Corporate, Securities & Tax

Dana Gloor, a principal in the Corporate, Securities & Tax practice group, recently contributed a chapter to New Developments in Securities Litigation: Leading Lawyers on Adapting to Trends in Securities Litigation and Regulatory Enforcement.It was published by Aspatore Books/Thomson Reuters.

The Supreme Court decided the Shearson v. McMahon case in 1987, holding that pre-dispute arbitration agreements were binding on investors who have disputes with their broker-dealers. As securities broker-dealers uniformly include arbitration clauses in their customer agreements, this means that for almost thirty years, every customer of every broker-dealer in the United States has been bound to arbitrate almost all disputes they may have with the firm. Similarly, regulators frequently bring enforcement matters before administrative law judges or appointed hearing panels similar to arbitration panels. In other words, arbitration, or something like it, is the primary means of resolving disputes involving the securities industry.