On Tuesday, J.P. Morgan Securities filed for injunctive relief to preserve the client roster of a departed advisor, Joseph A. Michael, pending a dispute resolution hearing in front of a Financial Industry Regulatory Authority panel. Michael left J.P. Morgan to join Morgan Stanley Smith Barney in December.

JPMorgan’s complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Michigan’s Southern Division, called for a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction to maintain “the status quo” after alleging Michael had already persuaded 32 clients to move $28 million to his new firm.

Neither Michael nor J.P. Morgan could be reached by press time.

Michael, who had worked as a “private client advisor” in the Farmington Hills, Mich., branch office of JPMorgan Chase Bank, worked with some 245 clients with $161 million in assets under management at the time of his resignation on December 2 of last year, the complaint said.

According to the complaint, Michael allegedly violated his employment agreement—which included non-solicitation and confidentiality provisions—by calling his JPMorgan clients on their personal cell phones and asking them to move their accounts to Morgan Stanley.

“One JPMorgan client indicated that Michael has called him three times since he left JPMorgan in an attempt to get the client to move his accounts to Morgan Stanley, even though the client told Michael that he is not interested in transferring his accounts,” the complaint said.

In another example, the complaint alleged that Michael had called a client after his resignation, said that he had changed offices and asked the client to meet him at the new building. When the client arrived at the office for the meeting, it was only then that Michael told him that he had left JPMorgan for Morgan Stanley, and he presented the client with completed paperwork that would move his accounts to the new firm, the complaint said.

“The client indicated that he did not provide Michael with any account information in order to transfer his JPMorgan accounts to Morgan Stanley and that Michael somehow already had it,” the complaint said.

In the days leading up to his resignation, Michael allegedly accessed an unusually high number of client records in noticeable spurts, including 12 client profiles early in the morning on the day he submitted his resignation, the complaint said.

Once he was in contact with a client, Michael’s pitch was that the clients would have access to better products, reduced fees and better returns at Morgan Stanley, and even better access to prime entertainment, like golfing outings, the complaint said.

As in the past, in similar situations where an advisor in a bank branch has left to go to a competitor, JPMorgan said it was seeking a restraining order that would put a hold on client movement until the firm and the advisor go before Finra mediation to sort out which clients belong to whom. Those mediations can take up to 18 months to resolve.

In December, JPMorgan filed a similar complaint against Robert P. Lewis of Oro Valley, Ariz., who the firm alleged had jumped to Wells Fargo and taken 35 clients with almost $20 million in assets with him.

And last summer, JPMorgan aimed suits at six former advisors within just over a week. On July 19, it was David M. Anderson and Seth Chamberlain; on July 21, Samira Arikat and Brian Armstrong; on July 26 it was Lewis Duncan; and on July 27, Matthew Reynolds.

In all these cases, the firm asked the court to prevent the advisors from taking clients pending a resolution of the dispute by Finra arbitrators.

Another common denominator among them is that the advisors held the title “private client advisor,” a job which JPMorgan describes as one where the advisor occupies a desk in a bank branch office and works with existing clients. It is not part of their job to bring in new clients and build a book of business, the firm has said.

That is instead the purview of reps at JPMorgan Advisors, a division whose professionals are separate from those who work in the bank branches and also separate from another group of advisors in the private banking division.