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The following story appeared in The New York Times on October 27, 2011:
With skepticism of Wall Street running high, investors who have a beef with their brokerage firm are opting overwhelming to have their cases heard by arbitration panels that have no ties to the big banks.
Linda Fienberg, president of dispute resolution at the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, the Wall Street-financed regulatory body that oversees arbitration, said on Thursday that 77 percent of eligible investors were opting for a new program that allowed them to have their claim against Wall Street heard by a three-person panel with no links to the financial industry.
“It is higher than I anticipated,” she told a crowd of 200 or so lawyers gathered here for the annual meeting of the Public Investors Arbitration Bar Association, an industry group that represents lawyers who sue Wall Street firms. “I would have thought it would have been 60 to 65 percent.”
Investors who feel they have been wronged by Wall Street have one main course of action: arbitration.
The forum has long been criticized for being stacked in favor of the big brokerage firms. For years, arbitration panels had to have one member who came from Wall Street.
But in 2008 Finra began a pilot program that allowed for investors to pick an all-public panel. During the pilot program, 54 percent of eligible investors opted for an all-public panel, Ms. Feinberg said.
Earlier this year, the program came into full force — and 77 percent are choosing an all-public panel. Ms. Feinberg didn’t attribute the increased demand for all-public panels to investor concerns about Wall Street, saying rather that people may simply have been “skeptical” about the pilot program because it was a new initiative.
George Friedman, executive vice president of dispute resolution at Finra, said the authority had stepped up its efforts to remind arbitrators to disclose any potential conflicts.
Arbitration awards are hard to overturn, and parties looking to have one reversed must show things like fraud or disregard of the law in the process. Mr. Friedman said arbitrator bias was “the most common ground” parties used to try to have awards overturned. As a result, he said, arbitrator training manuals for Finra now list cases where awards have been overturned because of arbitrator bias.
“The mantra is disclose, disclose, disclose,” he said.