UBS is asking a federal court to issue a temporary restraining order against a high-profile team of advisors based in Atlanta that moved to RBC Wealth Management on August 18.
The team handled $5.5 billion in assets for UBS and had relationships with hundreds of the bank’s clients. UBS said the group generated annual revenues of more than $21 million, and it has also beem listed on Barron’s 2023 “Top 100 Wealth Management Teams.”
UBS is seeking injunctive relief and a TRO against three advisors—Leslie Lauer, Wayne Curt Rubinas and Rebecca Glasgow—who worked for its ESOP Group, which was founded in 1989 and helps business owners with succession, specifically transitions to employee stock ownership plans. The three also worked with rich and ultra-rich clients.
The restraining order, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia Atlanta Division, asks the court to stop the team from soliciting UBS clients and using confidential information.
UBS said that the team of departing advisors benefited from introductions and partnering agreements with the company and that their move to RBC has caused them to run afoul of non-solicitation agreements.
According to the document, UBS promoted the team members to other UBS financial advisors throughout the country “who were, in turn, encouraged to introduce [the team] to their UBS clients so that defendants could provide ESOP-related advice and solutions to these existing UBS clients.”
“Critically, [the ESOP advisors] signed partnering agreements with these other UBS financial advisors in which they promised that if they ever left UBS, they would not solicit the clients to whom they had been introduced by the other UBS financial advisors.” UBS also stresses that Lauer and her team didn’t create the ESOP business in Atlanta but were brought in by the group’s founder, Keith Mericka.
The bank said that in May 2020, the three advisors were invited to join its “Aspiring Legacy Financial Advisor” program, also known as ALFA, which allows advisors planning to leave the industry to transition their clients over to other UBS professionals. This would let Lauer and her team “inherit” the clientele built by the ESOP team’s founder, UBS says. Under the program, new advisors split a percentage of the commissions and revenues on client accounts for five years with their predecessors, their portion increasing while the legacy advisor’s percentage decreases.
“In exchange for the opportunity to inherit the ALFA clients and continue to work with them following the legacy ALFA [advisor’s] separation from UBS, the defendants expressly agreed to a confidentiality provision in the 2020 ALFA agreement,” UBS said. “Specifically, the defendants agreed that, during their employment with UBS and following the termination of their employment with UBS, they would be prohibited from directly or indirectly using or disclosing any UBS client information, except in the course of carrying out their employment duties with UBS.” The partnering arrangement said there should be no solicitation of clients for a restricted period that lasted until one year after the advisors left UBS or five years after the ALFA agreement was entered into, whichever came later.
“Crucially, within hours of their resignations, [the] defendants immediately commenced soliciting UBS customers they were entrusted to service, seeking to have them transfer their assets to RBC,” UBS said.
Then banks said Lauer also received loans in excess of $7 million as part of the ALFA program.
UBS claims that in the weeks before they resigned, Lauer and her team printed “thousands of pages of documents containing highly confidential UBS client information, including client lists, ‘client windows’ and prospect lists. The timing and volume of printing, coupled with the nature of the documents printed, strongly suggest they were printed and taken by [the] defendants to be used for their transition to RBC, rather than for any legitimate UBS business purpose.”
Lauer, who personally works in Ohio, has been with UBS since 2006, and is ranked on Barron’s list of top 1,200 financial advisors and top 100 women financial advisors for 2023. Rubinas had also been with the firm since 2006 and Glasgow since 2008. All three are listed by Forbes as a “Best In State Wealth Advisors.”
UBS said that the team threw more salt in the wounds by taking the entire ESOP team, including senior wealth strategy associates Catherine Mericka and Kurt Hirshman; senior investment associates Dana Breland and Dianna Moore; and client associates Andrew Beckett, Rebecca Leichter and Christy Dryden.
UBS said it had no comment on the filing. Press representatives for RBC did not return requests for comment.