Joseph D. Edmondson, Jr. is a partner, securities litigation lawyer, and commercial litigation lawyer with Foley & Lardner LLP. Mr. Edmondson focuses primarily on defending securities litigation and enforcement proceedings brought by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, state regulators, FINRA, and other self-regulatory organizations (SROs). He is a member of the firm’s Securities, Enforcement & Litigation and Securities, Commodities & Exchange Regulation Practices.
Mr. Edmondson has more than twenty years of experience in commercial litigation and regulatory investigations, involving securities industry clients, but also in a wide array of matters ranging from health care, antitrust, contract disputes, real estate, attorney professional responsibility and large collections. He has counseled firms and individuals on compliance with federal securities laws and regulations, as well as the rules of FINRA, the NYSE and SROs, with an emphasis on supervision and supervisory procedures. He has been called upon to assist with internal investigations of broker-dealers and public companies.
Mr. Edmondson has represented numerous broker-dealers, clearing firms, and individuals in regulatory investigations, litigation and arbitration proceedings involving, among other subjects: failure to supervise, NASDAQ trading practices, AML, FCPA, high-frequency trading and risk management, institutional and retail sales practices with respect to equity and fixed income products, underwritings of public and municipal offerings, "pay-to-play," insider trading, stock manipulation, advertising, research and suitability.
Mr. Edmondson has handled nearly 100 customer and industry arbitrations before FINRA and NYSE panels, the subjects of which have included private placement securities, high-risk technology stocks (the so-called “tech wreck” cases), and auction-rate securities, to name a few. A number of cases have involved novel attempts by claimants to hold owners of and investors in broker-dealers, as well as non-broker-dealer affiliates and clearing firms, responsible for investment losses. Several of Mr. Edmondson’s cases also have resulted in successful expungement demands on behalf of his individual clients.
Mr. Edmondson also has achieved significant success challenging arbitration jurisdiction in Federal District Court in appropriate cases. For example, in a recent case in the Northern District of California, Mr. Edmondson lead a team of Foley litigators in successfully enjoining a series of three FINRA arbitrations alleging that an indirect majority investor in a holding company that owned a defunct broker-dealer was liable as a control person or successor for certain liabilities of the broker-dealer, including the claimants’ investment losses. Mr. Edmondson lead a related effort to enjoin, in the Eastern District of Michigan, some 39 FINRA cases in a mass arbitration situation involving the same defunct broker-dealer. Prior to that, he obtained injunctive relief from the Northern District of Illinois preventing the prosecution of two pending FINRA arbitration cases filed against a clearing firm, on the grounds that the firm lacked a “customer” relationship with the claimants.
