San Diego, CA – Shustak Reynolds & Partners, P.C., of San Diego, New York and San Francisco announces that it has successfully obtained an order dismissing, pre-hearings, a Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (“FINRA”) arbitration claim due to the Claimant’s failure to cooperate in discovery. While dismissals of FINRA claims prior to hearings are extremely rare, the rules expressly authorize arbitrators to dismiss a claim when a party materially and intentionally fails to comply with a prior order of the panel.
The case, titled Lieberman v. Financial Northeastern Securities, Inc. (FINRA Case No. 10-00231), involved a Claimant who alleged she lost money in her investment accounts during the calamitous market downturn of 2008the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. While Claimant alleged her former broker-dealer, Financial Northeastern Securities, Inc. (“FNS”), was responsible for her alleged losses and sought more than $600,000 in total damages, her allegations were directly contradicted by hundreds of telephone recordings FNS maintained as part of its fastidious recordkeeping process. The recordings revealed that Claimant’s self-directed, sometimes risky investment decisions and substantial withdrawals of principal during a declining market caused her lossesnot any wrongdoing on the part of FNS.
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