TRANSCRIPT:
“I get asked all the time how is it that we determine what kind of cases we take or do we take on the case. The answer for us is that we are actually pretty selective. I would say we turn down a lot more cases than we accept and the issue is that we want to make sure that the cases that we take on we can get a recovery for the clients.
I think back about 15 years ago, the very first case that I ever did, I had really nothing to do with the case. I didn’t help work it up. I was a more or less new associate at the law firm and I was just asked by one of the partners to show up and join the arbitration, so I did. I questioned one witness but mostly was just there to help, you know, pass paper and be an observer, and we did the hearing.
The hearing finished and with these FINRA cases, you don’t get a decision at the end of your hearing, you have to wait about 30 days. And I remember the lawyer for the big broker dealer that we were suing. He was in the House Council. He called me afterward to tell me what a good job he thought I had done on the witness that I had questioned and that he figured he would be seeing me again in the future. We ended up losing that case, and I realized that: A) the case wasn’t very good, probably the selection of whether they had a good chance of recovery probably wasn’t there, but also I think we hadn’t worked it up, you know, as a firm the way we should have. There wasn’t an expert there, there wasn’t that kind of thing.
And I told myself at that moment, “Never again. I’m not doing that again.” It was too rough on the lawyers, it was much too rough on the client. And so I just decided, “We’re going to do a different way.”
From that point forward, I started building my own book of practice, bringing in my own cases, getting to be the one in charge of deciding whether we’re taking on a case or not, and we’ve never lost a case since that point. Any case that we’ve taken on in the Securities realm in a federal arbitration, we’ve gotten a recovery for the client.
Now I think it’s for two reasons. One, we’ve become much more selective in what we take on. We turn away far more cases than we take. The other is that we know how to work them up, we do them right, and that’s partly because we don’t get washed over in volume. We try to manage our caseload and make sure we’re only taking on those cases that we could really help with and that we think we can have success with.
So there are a lot of firms out there who do this kind of work and some of them take just about any case that comes in and there’s a good place for that. There are people with sort of marginal claims that still need help, that still need to see if they can get a recovery, and maybe they can get a settlement for 30 cents on the dollar, and that’s okay. It just doesn’t happen to be the kind of cases that we take on. We take on cases that we think we can win, that we can actually get a recovery on, and that have larger damages to permit that to make sense from a business standpoint.
So if you think that you’ve been harmed, you think that you have a case of suitability or a product that you were sold that was improper by your broker, give us a call. We’re happy to take a look. We’ll probably take more time than some of the other firms to evaluate your case and let you know what we think. We don’t charge anything to do it, and we’ll tell you whether we think we can help or not, and you can make your decision from there.”
