O  T  H  E  R      D  E  C  I  S  I  O  N  S  :

HX in Boston, LLC v. Berggren, 2008 WL 516582
(Mass. Super. Feb. 11, 2008) (Neel, J.).

Plaintiff sought to enjoin defendants from using allegedly proprietary advertising information taken from the office of their free weekly, Boston-area newspaper, In Newsweekly. According to the Plaintiffs’ submissions, Defendant William Berggren had been responsible for inter-acting with advertisers and maintaining the company’s advertiser database. Berggren formed a competing publication, and took the advertiser information with him when he left. He also

deleted the information from Plaintiff’s system.

Although much of the information was publicly available or “easily developed by legitimate means,” Berggren not only took it for himself, he also deleted it from Plaintiff’s system. In order to restore to Plaintiff its rightful “head start” on the competing publication, the Court enjoined Defendants from contacting any of the prospects in the advertiser database for a period of 45 days.

Smith Barney Division of CitiGroup Global Markets, Inc. v. Griffin,
2008 WL 325269 (Mass. Super. Jan. 23, 2008) (Gants, J.).

The Court denied a preliminary injunction to Smith Barney, which sought to prevent a departing broker from soliciting the clients she developed while working for Smith Barney. Quoting Police Captain Louis Renault in the movie, Casablanca, the Court is plainly weary of claims by “financial services companies . . that they are . . . ‘shocked, shocked’ that another financial services company would show so little respect for the sanctity of a contract preserving confidential client information and prohibiting client solicitation as to induce their financial adviser to breach such a contract,

[while] they are themselves engaged in precisely the same ‘shocking’ conduct.”

The clear message here, and in several prior decisions from the Business Session, is that brokerage firms are likely to fare poorly seeking preliminary injunctions against departing brokers. Also of interest, this decision includes in an appendix a copy of the Protocol for Broker Recruiting, entered into by 39 financial institutions, precluding monetary or other liability for hiring brokers from other signatories, so long as the hiring firm does not engage in “raiding.”.