Welcome and thank you for joining today's webinar hosted by me Joe Boyhan of MCO, and Brian Rubin and Adam Pollet of Eversheds Sutherland. Our co-hosts for today come from an international law firm, Eversheds Sutherland. Brian Rubin is a partner at Eversheds Sutherland and the head of the SEC, FINRA, and State Securities Enforcement Team. Brian briefly served as Deputy Chief Counsel of Enforcement at NASD, FINRA and Senior Enforcement Counsel at the SEC.

Adam Pollet is an associate at Eversheds Sutherland and represents broker dealers, investment advisors, financial institutions and their individual representatives in internal investigations and investigations by the SEC and FINRA. He also represents his clients in complex commercial litigation in state and federal courts and councils them on regulatory and compliance matters. With that, I'll hand you over to my co-hosts.

Thank you very much. Good morning, good afternoon. This is Brian Rubin and with me is Adam. Although we're half way through 2017, today we will be looking at the regulatory enforcement role of the SEC and FINRA during 2016 and will ponder whether 2017 will trump 2016 and whether enforcement actions will continue to be huge. For those of you who have heard those one-liners before, feel free to send in better ones if you have them.

Today we will be reviewing SEC enforcement actions from fiscal year 2016 as well as FINRA disciplinary actions. We'll be looking at cases, fines, enforcement trends and make some predictions. We'll be looking at a lot of numbers and trends and focusing on some of the larger cases and have some take-aways with regard to that.

You won't leave here with nuts and bolts lessons on how to run your firms, but you'll learn about certain issues that you should be thinking about. It's sort of like blue sheets meets best [inaudible 00:02:06] of the week and the point is to give you a flavor of what's going on to make sure you're focusing and thinking about the right types of issues.

For those of you who don't know, part of our analysis is based on a database that we have of FINRA enforcement actions so for friends and family and clients we can easily pull up various types of cases. So if you have an email retention case, we can pull up all of the FINRA enforcement email retention cases and for today's presentation we slice and dice some of the data to put cases into various categories.

To make things a bit more entertaining today, we've included a couple of polling questions and a trivia question which deals with famous people born in May. As many of you know, Sutherland recently combined with Eversheds which is a UK based firm so we have a new name which is Eversheds Sutherland. For the first five or so people who respond in an email to me with correct answers to our questions, you'll receive Eversheds Sutherland swag of some sort, but wait until the webinar is over before you send in emails with your answers and you can respond to the email brianrubin@eversheds-sutherland.com At the end of the presentation, you'll see the email about that and one housekeeping note. Send your questions as we go and we'll try to answer the questions as long as they're not too hard.

Eversheds - Sutherland