Brian Rubin

Brian is the Washington office leader of Sutherland’s Litigation group and the Administrative Partner in charge of the Securities Enforcement and Litigation Team. Brian previously served as Deputy Chief Counsel of Enforcement at NASD (FINRA) and Senior Enforcement Counsel at the SEC.

 Go afternoon and good morning to everyone. Today, we are going to do just an overall spotlight of some SEC and FINRA issues, focusing on primarily enforcement cases and then touching a little bit on the DOL's new fiduciary rule and emphasizing litigation, regulatory, and enforcement aspects from that. Let's go to the first slide, I guess.

We decided to have, as people know if they've ever sat in with us in any of these webinars, we have a theme, and the theme is the spotlight. What spotlight we're going to focusing on somewhat quotes from blockbuster movies, and at the end, we'll talk about what the implications are for you and what that means.

Every year, we do a review of FINRA disciplinary actions. We look at cases, fines, trends, types of cases, and we end up making predictions about where FINRA is going to focus, what particular areas. This is a big-picture look at these types of cases with lots of data, and we liken it to Moneyball of securities with them top plays of the day because we'll be looking at a lot of numbers and trends. Then we'll also be looking at some of the big-picture cases. Nobody's going to be crying during this program, however, as far as I know. There will be some nuts and bolts as far as advice that firms should be thinking about, implications of cases, but a lot of it is just to give you a flavor of what's going on.

We'll get to that movie quote in a second. In terms of the enforcement statistics from FINRA, what we do is we have a database of all of the cases that FINRA has brought that are listed and reported in FINRA's monthly disciplinary and other FINRA actions publication. We also add press releases and major news sources for case information. We use that database for our clients and our friends so that if they have issues with email, for example, or supervision of emails, we can pull up all of the cases that deal with that subject for them.

For these purposes, we also slice and dice the data, and we gather information on all of FINRA's cases, including settlements, which are letters of acceptance, waiver, and consent, or AWCs. We look at complaints, rule 9522 suspensions, and also minor rule violations. Then we slice and dice the data based on various categories to get the number of cases. We use some of FINRA's annual statistics. We also look at fines. We look at remediation, and we look at the types of cases, and as everybody in the audience knows, when FINRA brings an action, it may involve 2 different areas.

For example, it may involve supervision and suitability. We put them into both buckets. 

Read our blog post, "FINRA Fines 2016 - 7 Key Facts"