Expert Witness Blog
Jonathan Evans and his co-counsel, Michael Edmiston, won in back-to-back arbitration hearings before Los Angeles based Financial Industry Regulatory Authority arbitration panels. In both cases, the conduct of the brokers and their firms was so shocking that both arbitration panels awarded attorney’s fees and securities expert witness fees along with sizable compensatory damages. Street Insider.com also reports that in the first hearing:
…Evans represented a senior citizen and his wife against A.G. Edwards and its broker, Anthony Russo. Mr. Russo, a broker who had a prior history of discipline including both a termination from a firm and a regulatory suspension for recommending unsuitable securities, positioned much of his client’s retirement funds in high-risk equities just months before the technology bubble imploded. Despite calls from his clients, Mr. Russo did absolutely nothing to mitigate the devastating losses; rather he simply abandoned his clients to one of the worst bear markets in history…
On behalf of his clients, Evans recovered $84,000 in compensatory damages, $33,600 in attorney’s fees, and $13,000 expert witness fees. Anthony Russo, despite his checkered history, and now this arbitration award, is the branch manager of the A.G. Edwards office in Oxnard, California. The FINRA case number is 05-05647 and the award may be found at http://www.finra.org.