Spokane Office

The Spokane office offers a broad range of legal services to investors in securities, annuities, commodities, and real estate. Our investment fraud lawyers handle FINRA arbitrations, business litigation, and securities litigation.

We sue financial advisors, including investment advisers and stockbrokers, as well as insurance agents and insurance companies.

The overwhelming majority of the cases we bring against financial advisors have at least one of the three following characteristics:

1) Unsuitability: Often we find that a financial advisor has recommended an investment or investment strategy that might be fine for some investors, but does not “fit” our client.  Examples include speculative stock picking for retirees who cannot afford to lose their portfolio, or purchasing tax-advantaged products inside a tax-advantaged account. (To learn more about unsuitability, click here.)

2)      Illiquid Investments: In many cases, our clients were sold illiquid investments, meaning that either the investor cannot sell the investment or at least cannot liquidate the investment without paying big surrender charges. There are two reasons why illiquid investments are a strong indication that an investor should reach out to our law firm.

First, an investment might be unsuitable because it is illiquid. If a financial advisor knows that a client is going to need to sell an investment in the near future but recommends an illiquid investment, then that investment is probably unsuitable just because it is illiquid.

Second, investments that are illiquid typically pay financial advisors big commissions. This gives financial advisors a big incentive to recommend these investments, even if they do not fit an investor’s needs.

Common illiquid investments that we have experience with include:

a)       Annuities – variable annuities and equity-indexed annuities;

b)      Universal life insurance and whole life insurance;

c)       REITS (Real Estate Investment Trusts);

d)      Oil & gas limited partnerships; and

e)      Hedge funds and other private placements.

3)      Fraud: For some of our clients, their investment losses were caused by a financial advisor’s fraud. While the variety of these cases is limited only by the imagination of con artists, common types of investment fraud include:

a)       Ponzi schemes;

b)      Penny stock pump-and-dump schemes;

c)       Churning;

d)      Theft; and

e)      Misrepresentations.