David P. Meyer

Two Days in October

The accounts belonged largely to retirees in Marion County, Ohio.

They were nondiscretionary accounts, which describes an ordinary and specific arrangement: a broker may recommend a trade, explain its risks, and ask the customer to act, but the customer retains the authority to approve the decision. The money is the customer's and so is the judgment.

On October 7 and 8, 1998, broker Jeffrey Pickett anticipated a market downturn and shifted thousands of positions without first obtaining authorization — approximately 2,600 trades worth more than $40 million across the affected accounts. Portfolios that had generally held stocks and bonds were moved heavily into a money-market fund.

Before the transactions, the portfolios averaged roughly sixty percent stocks and forty percent bonds. Afterward, the average allocation stood at about fifteen percent stocks, ten percent bonds, and seventy-five percent money-market fund.

Pickett said he had acted to protect the clients. The account agreements did not give him discretion to substitute his judgment for theirs.

The class included approximately three hundred investors, and that allocation of authority supplied the case's starting point: when the account belonged to the customer, the decision to trade belonged there too.

Authority Beyond the Trade Confirmations

Trade confirmations went out, and they showed that securities had moved. They did not say that the transactions violated the account agreements, and they did not say that the firm could restore the former positions at its own cost.

The broker and his staff described the activity as a protective reallocation. Successor representatives did not begin explaining the unauthorized trades and advising customers to reinvest until months later — after the market had moved and the claimed losses had begun to accumulate.

For a retiree reading a confirmation, there was nothing to distinguish an unauthorized trade from an authorized one. The document reports what happened, not whether it was permitted.

$665,034

The class developed the cost of a prompt, firm-funded reversal as part of that chronology.

Restoring the positions would have cost approximately $665,034 on October 9 — the day after the trading. One week later, when the record showed the firm had sufficient information to recognize the unauthorized trading, restoration would have cost $3,425,593.

The difference between those figures gave the jury a concrete measure of the consequence of delay; it later returned a nine-figure verdict.

Meyer and the plaintiffs' team reconstructed the trades, account agreements, customer instructions, communications, broker activity, supervisory response, and the financial effect of the delayed restoration. The evidence connected thousands of individual transactions to a single common question: who held the authority to control each account.

The litigation traced responsibility from the broker who executed the transactions to the firm systems and managers responsible for the accounts and for the response to the trading activity.

Seven Years, Three Removals, Two Appeals

The Ohio state-court class action lasted seven years from filing through final recovery and included two appeals. Its month-long trial took place in September and October 2002.

It returned to Ohio state court after three separate federal removal attempts. Those proceedings preserved the state-law claims and allowed the certification, merits, and payment work to continue in the forum where the class had filed.

The jurisdictional litigation determined whether the case could proceed in the forum where the class had filed. Meyer defeated each of the three removal attempts, including the last in 2006 while the merits appeal was pending.

The jury returned a verdict exceeding $261 million for more than two hundred retirees, including compensatory and punitive damages. The judgment also accounted for stipulated annuity losses, prejudgment interest, and attorney fees alongside the contract and punitive damages. Jurors were asked to value the consequences of transferring thousands of positions in accounts the customers themselves had the right to control.

Meyer carried the retirees' claims through certification, jurisdictional disputes, liability, damages, interest, fees, and the account-level work required to turn the verdict into actual recovery.

From Verdict to Payment

After the judgment became enforceable, Meyer's team maintained the records, applied the governing allocation and interest rules customer by customer, assigned eligible amounts to the correct accounts, and carried the result through payment.

Every class member recovered one hundred percent of their account losses and attorney fees.

Full payment required the same account-level precision as the trial record. A class-wide judgment had to be translated into the correct amount for each account, with the applicable interest and allocation rules preserved through delivery. A favorable judgment still required administration before it became money in each customer's account.

Meyer was twenty-nine when he filed the case and had been out of law school fewer than five years. The completed recovery established the account-level method that still defines his investor practice: begin with the agreement, reconstruct the transactions, determine who held decision-making authority, prove the loss, and remain with the matter through distribution. In the years since, more than 1,500 individual investors from around the world have brought his firm their claims, and the firm has recovered more than $350 million in verdicts, judgments, and settlements.

What Account Statements Can Conceal

Unauthorized trading can be fully visible in an account ledger without being obvious to the customer in real time.

Confirmations show that securities moved. Statements may obscure turnover, margin exposure, compensation, or whether the client approved any of it. Online access may exist even where an older customer never activated it, or cannot use it comfortably enough to supervise an account. Frequent trading and margin can hide inside the sheer volume of paperwork, and commissions may create an incentive that no statement explains.

Meyer's teams reconstruct an account from statements, confirmations, emails, recorded calls, product materials, supervisory records, and testimony.

The questions stay concrete: what did the client authorize, what did the broker recommend or execute, how did the position fit the client's objectives, what compensation accompanied the activity, and what did supervisors know? Organizing those facts turns a dense transaction history into a record a panel or jury can evaluate.

The method applies in conventional brokerage disputes, direct securities claims, and FINRA arbitration alike. Each forum uses different procedures, but the evidentiary record still turns on the customer relationship, the challenged transactions, authorization, supervision, causation, and loss.

A direct securities action may turn instead on a particular offering, a fiduciary relationship, or a course of trading. There, transaction records establish what occurred, correspondence and testimony explain authorization and advice, and expert analysis measures turnover, concentration, margin, or loss. The forum determines how that evidence is organized, tested, and presented.

One Investor, One Panel

Meyer represents investors in FINRA arbitration involving unauthorized trading, unsuitable recommendations, concentration, financial exploitation, fraud, and supervisory failures.

A FINRA hearing places one customer's objectives, communications, recommendations, transaction history, and damages before a panel. His practice organizes those materials so the challenged conduct can be measured against the customer's actual instructions and financial goals.

The two proceedings differ in what they must accomplish. A class action requires common proof and a workable distribution method; an individual arbitration focuses the entire record on one investor's account. Both begin from the same three facts: what the investor authorized, what the financial professional recommended or executed, and how the account changed.

He has also carried the work to a wider audience. His book, The Investor Protector: Stories of Triumph Over Financial Advisors Who Lie, Cheat, and Steal, translates two decades of case files into the patterns ordinary investors can recognize before the loss — the same account-level questions, offered this time in advance.

The Awards Nobody Collected

Meyer's policy work also addresses the gap between winning an award and receiving payment.

In a 2018 comment on FINRA's proposed insurance-disclosure rule, he supported routine disclosure by broker-dealers that were thinly capitalized or not self-insured, and urged production of the complete liability policy — including amendments and riders — at a point when the parties could still use the information.

He argued that coverage terms shape settlement and claim strategy and therefore should be disclosed while the proceeding is active. Within FINRA's proposal, discovery remained separate from admissibility: insurance evidence could not be presented at a hearing without express panel authorization.

He later co-authored a Public Investors Advocate Bar Association report using 2020 data, which identified nineteen customer awards totaling approximately $5.05 million that had gone unpaid — about twenty-four percent of the dollars awarded to customers that year, and thirty percent of the customer-favorable awards.

Nearly a quarter of what investors won that year was never collected. The report proposed a national recovery pool for eligible investors, with defined eligibility and subrogation rules.

The insurance and recovery-pool proposals address payment in two ways: disclose the resources relevant to a claim while the proceeding is active, and establish a system for paying eligible awards when ordinary collection fails.

What BrokerCheck Keeps

Meyer's policy work has also addressed expungement of customer-dispute information from broker registration records.

BrokerCheck lets an investor review a financial professional's public history before handing over their savings. Its usefulness depends entirely on whether that record stays complete enough to inform the choice.

The study Meyer co-authored examined 3,378 awards over fourteen years, then reviewed a sample of 700 awards issued from August 2019 through October 2020. In that sample, expungement was granted at least in part in ninety percent of the matters reviewed, while customers opposed the request in only about fifteen percent.

An expungement request is typically heard in a proceeding in which the customer has no continuing stake and often no practical reason to attend. The customer may not appreciate that the outcome will shape what a future investor is able to learn.

The recommendations called for notice to affected customers and state securities regulators, meaningful participation, and a more complete adversarial record before customer-dispute information could be removed. The proposal treated expungement as a decision affecting not only the immediate proceeding but the information available to every investor who consults the record afterward.

That policy work sits directly alongside the litigation. Both concern informed control: a client cannot meaningfully authorize a trade without understanding it, and a prospective client cannot meaningfully choose a broker without a reliable public record.

Current Practice

Meyer is the founder and managing principal of Meyer Wilson Werning in Columbus, representing individuals and groups in securities arbitration, financial-fraud litigation, and class actions.

He earned a finance degree from Ohio University and both a J.D. and an LL.M. from Capital University Law School. He has been elected president of three trial-lawyer bar associations, including the Public Investors Advocate Bar Association, and teaches lawyers about investor hearings, opening statements, closing arguments, fraud against older investors, and claimant-side securities practice. PIABA named him a Director Emeritus in 2023, extending his service to the claimant-side bar beyond his term as president.

Across litigation, arbitration, writing, and policy, Meyer addresses the full process from account authority and transaction reconstruction through proof, review, and payment. He first carried that process from filing through distribution for the three hundred retirees in Marion County.