J.P. Morgan on Monday filed a complaint in U.S. District Court asking for a temporary restraining order and injunctive relief against advisor Timothy Chad Logsdon for allegedly violating his non-solicitation agreement when he joined another firm in November and took clients with him, the complaint said.
When contacted, Logsdon said he had no comment on the dispute, which ultimately will be decided in arbitration before a Finra panel. J.P. Morgan’s complaint sought a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction to keep Logsdon from contacting any former clients and retain the client status quo pending the Finra arbitration, which could take up to 18 months until final resolution.
According to the complaint, Logsdon resigned from his role as a Private Client Advisor in the Louisville, Ky., office of JPMorgan Chase Bank on Nov. 12, 2021, and immediately joined BLVD Private Wealth in Prospect, Ky., a nearby suburb. Resigning with him was Margaret Pape, an Investment Associate, and both Logsdon and Pape are now listed as part of the BLVD team on its website.
BLVD was founded in 2020 by Chris Brady, and he was joined in 2021 by Ashley Baumgardner; both had worked in the same JPMorgan Chase Bank office as Logsdon and Pape, according to BrokerCheck. The most recent ADV filing for BLVD was in Oct. 2021, and it reported 22 total clients with $37 million in assets under management.
According to the complaint, Logsdon has already influenced at least 20 former JPMorgan Chase clients to transfer more than $17 million in AUM to his new firm, and potentially a lot more could follow.
“At the time he left JPMorgan, [Logsdon] serviced approximately 289 JPMorgan clients/households with approximately $153 million in total assets under management, the substantial majority of which were either pre-existing JPMorgan clients at the time they were assigned to [Logsdon], or were developed by [Logsdon] while working for JPMorgan,” the complaint said.
The complaint said J.P. Morgan believed that Logsdon has been calling and emailing his former clients, including calls to personal cell phones and emails to personal email addresses, information that could only have come from the company’s confidential database. In addition, some of those clients have told J.P. Morgan that Logsdon requested a meeting to discuss joining him at BLVD, told those clients he could offer more investment options and lower fees, and gave as reason for his departure from JPMorgan Chase a workload too high to service clients properly, the complaint said.
J.P. Morgan’s non-solicitation agreement prohibits advisors who leave the firm from soliciting former clients for a year following their departure.
Another J.P. Morgan dispute with a different advisor, Gwen Campbell, made headlines in the fall when she filed a request for a temporary restraining order to keep the firm’s Private Bank from poaching her clients while they waited for Finra arbitration. The judge declined her request on the grounds that there was no evidence any poaching had occurred.
A major difference in that case was that Campbell had joined the firm with more than $1 billion in AUM following a full career as a financial advisor.