Partners August M. Iorio and Jorge Altamirano discuss Iorio Altamirano LLP’s groundbreaking arbitration award against Robinhood over the January 2021 trading restrictions and what the award may mean for retail investors.
Q&A:
When was the arbitration claim that led to the award filed?
On behalf of a client, securities arbitration law firm Iorio Altamirano LLP has filed an arbitration claim through FINRA Dispute Resolution Services against David Lerner Associates Inc. (“David Lerner”). The claim alleges that President and CEO Martin Walcoe and David Lerner unsuitably recommended that the customer purchase and hold Puerto Rico municipal bonds and misrepresented and omitted material facts concerning the risk and safety of the bonds. The recommendations and misrepresentations occurred at a time when credit rating agencies were downgrading Puerto Rico municipal bonds and indicated that further credit downgrades were imminent. At the time of the recommendations, Mr. Walcoe was an investment counselor and branch manager.
The claim also alleged that David Lerner also failed to suitably and properly allocate the customer’s brokerage account. Instead, David Lerner concentrated the customer’s account in risky, speculative, and uninsured Puerto Rico municipal bonds.
David Lerner’s recommendations to purchase and hold speculative Puerto Rico municipal bonds and its repeated recommendations to concentrate the customer’s investment accounts into speculative junk bonds were unsuitable and not in the customer’s best interest in light of the customer’s investment objectives and “middle ground” risk tolerance.
Dear Clients, Colleagues, and Friends:
We wish you the very best for a joy-filled holiday season and health in the new year.
As this trying year ends, we wanted to take a moment to thank you for your support, encouragement, and trust. We couldn’t have launched our securities arbitration law firm without you. After helping investors recover investment losses in over 1,000 cases over the past decade, we decided to open our own law practice, Iorio Altamirano LLP, with one key goal in mind: to do things differently, better. To guide this journey, we committed to our core values of grit, integrity, and excellence. We put these traits to use with the belief that every client deserves to be represented zealously and ethically and that every colleague, opposing party, and client deserves to be treated with dignity and respect.
We are proud to announce the launch of our securities arbitration boutique, Iorio Altamirano LLP.
We intend to build a client-focused national practice that offers a bold approach and aggressively pursues the recovery of investment losses on behalf of clients. Our new firm will represent individual investors, groups of individuals, business entities, family offices, credit unions, and institutional investors.
“We have a strong commitment to transparency. It is rooted in who we are as attorneys and as a law firm. Our core values of integrity, excellence, and grit will help us deliver results for our clients,” said partner August Iorio.
Securities Arbitration Lawyer Blog