Welcome to my new blog. It's not that I don't have enough to do out here in the wilds of New Mexico, but when IA editor-in-chief Jamie Green asked me to write a weekly blog about, well, anything I wanted, and to "try to be opinionated, and passionate, and use words like 'chowderhead,'" it was an offer I couldn't refuse. So, my plan is to write about issues that strike me as important to the profession of financial advice, and perhaps you'll send me a response that advances the discussion.
To kick things off, an old friend called the other day to talk about a thorny issue in which his firm is involved. It seems the firm recently sued one of its former junior partners, who after many years at the firm, left and took along the clients with whom she worked. To hear him tell it, that wasn't their main concern: It seems she also took those clients' files with her, and under our current privacy laws, the firm is legally responsible for the confidentiality of those files, with some liability exposure should their identities be stolen before the clients could agree in writing to sign on with her new firm.
