A Financial Industry Regulatory Authority arbitration panel has awarded a former Wells Fargo advisor rep $384,000 in damages from a dispute that arose after he left the firm in February 2015.
 
The advisor, Joel Jacobs of Omaha, Neb., claimed Wells Fargo Advisors owed him for lost compensation and income after he was “unjustly stripped of clients,” according to the award dated Tuesday, which was released by Finra on Wednesday.
 
Wells Fargo, the plaintiff in the case, went after Jacobs for allegedly violating terms of the broker recruitment protocol, which allows departing advisors to take basic client information and contact those clients when they move to and from firms that are signatories to the pact.
 
The firm claimed Jacobs attempted to “manipulate customers and abuse the letter and intent of the Protocol” by sending an “unauthorized ‘inquiry’ letter” to customers in an attempt to expand the list of individuals he could solicit, the award said.
 
Jacobs, in turn, alleged that his former partner and manager at Wells Fargo Advisors, James Pekelder, “harassed him [and] took unreasonable inflammatory actions against Jacobs,” the award states.
 
The three-person arbitration panel did not give an explanation for the decision.
 
“The award I think you can tie to clients that Joel had a fair claim to” in a partnership with Pekelder, said attorney Gail Boliver of Marshalltown, Iowa, who represented Jacobs. But Pekelder “didn’t permit him to take” those clients, he said.
 
The amount Jacobs won is net of $22,700 he must pay in attorneys’ fees to Wells Fargo Advisors, incurred in a discovery dispute during the case.
 
The award doesn’t detail the discovery issue, but Boliver said it involved an alleged outside business activity Jacobs had with his father-in-law, and a request for related documents about the business that Jacobs did not have.
 
Jacobs, a former pro football prospect who was signed as a rookie free agent by the New England Patriots and St. Louis Rams in 2004 as a tight end, dropped his securities license in March 2015 to become an owner in Quantum Financial Partners, an RIA firm based in Overland Park, Kan.
 
A spokeswoman for Wells Fargo was not able to provide a comment Thursday. Jacobs did not return a call for comment.