Celesq® Presenters

Jeff Plotkin represents broker-dealers, investment advisers, financial services professionals, public companies and their officers and directors, auditors, attorneys, and institutional investors in a wide variety of regulatory, criminal, and civil litigation and arbitration matters nationwide. He also conducts internal investigations for financial services companies. 

Jeff started his career in the SEC's Division of Enforcement, New York Regional Office, where he served as Staff Attorney; Chief of the Branch of Broker-Dealer Enforcement and Interpretations; and Assistant Regional Administrator. At the SEC, Jeff handled investigations and enforcement actions involving investment fund fraud, underwriting fraud, unregistered securities distributions, market manipulation, and violations of the broker-dealer net capital and customer reserve rules. He was the lead SEC trial attorney in the successful federal court action to enjoin the fraudulent sales practices of ten penny stock brokers at J.T. Moran & Co., Inc. (the basis for the fictional J.T. Marlin brokerage firm in the movie “Boiler Room”), and one of the SEC trial attorneys in the successful federal court action to enjoin the largest “free riding” margin scheme in history.

After the SEC, Jeff was an associate of the Morvillo Abramowitz law firm, a white collar criminal defense boutique in New York City, where he represented entities and individuals in criminal and regulatory investigations and conducted internal corporate investigations. Immediately prior to joining Finn Dixon in 2012, Jeff was a partner of Day Pitney LLP in its New York City and Stamford, CT offices, and was Chair of that firm’s Government Investigations practice group and Broker-Dealer and Investment Advisers practice group.

 Jeff has enjoyed considerable success during the “Wells Notice” process in persuading the Staffs of the SEC, FINRA and the securities exchanges to reverse their preliminary determinations to recommend enforcement actions against his clients. Among other successes, Jeff’s Wells Submissions and further advocacy on behalf of his clients have successfully terminated investigations against his clients without enforcement action in the following matters: 

• An SEC investigation of a mortgage-backed securities salesman at a major broker-dealer for allegedly making material misrepresentations to hedge fund counterparties during trade negotiations;
• An SEC investigation of an investment adviser for failure to disclose conflicts of interest surrounding receipt of 12b-1 fees for the sale of mutual funds to managed accounts;
• An SEC insider trading investigation of a securities analyst for allegedly tipping institutional clients of an impending ratings change on a stock;
• An SEC investigation of a portfolio manager to a mutual fund for alleged disclosure failures by the mutual fund in its SEC filings;
• A FINRA insider trading investigation of a securities analyst based on alleged “URL guessing” of web pages where a public company was loading its quarterly earnings statements in advance of public announcement;
• A FINRA investigation of a branch manager of a broker-dealer subsidiary of an insurance company for allegedly failing to supervise several brokers who participated in a Ponzi scheme; and
• A stock exchange investigation of a broker-dealer and its electronic communications network (ECN) for alleged violations of the “trade-through” rule of SEC Regulation NMS. 

Over the years, Jeff has been appointed to undertake a variety of independent regulatory projects, including serving as the: 

• Court-appointed Distribution Agent for a $67 million SEC Fair Fund. In that role, he prepared and implemented a plan of distribution of Fair Fund assets to investors harmed by a public company's multi-year scheme to overstate its revenues and earnings;
• SEC-appointed Plan Administrator for a $50 million SEC Fair Fund. In that role, he monitored and audited the distribution of Fair Fund assets to investors harmed by a broker-dealer's failure to disclose facts in the offer and sale of the mutual funds;
• Designated Independent Consultant for a NYSE specialist firm pursuant to settlements with the SEC and NYSE in the so-called "Specialist Case" (which involved allegations that NYSE specialists inter-positioned and traded ahead of customer orders on the NYSE).  In that role, he conducted a review of all the specialist's policies, procedures and systems for handling customer order flow on the NYSE, and recommended amendments and revisions to the specialist's policies, procedures and systems to ensure compliance with SEC and NYSE rules; and
• Independent Third-Party Auditor for a NYSE specialist firm pursuant to former NYSE Rule 104(h).  In that role, he conducted reviews of all specialist algorithms and systems to ensure they operated in accordance with SEC and NYSE rules. 

Jeff has been an adjunct professor for New York Law School’s LLM program for Financial Services Law, was a guest lecturer at the Columbia Business School for over ten years on insider trading law for securities analysts, and has served as a panelist at numerous seminars and conferences concerning securities regulation and arbitration.    

Jeff is the former co-Chair of the Securities Subcommittee of the New York State Bar Association’s White Collar Criminal Litigation Committee, and the principal author of that Committee’s published report on criminal prosecutorial discretion in insider trading cases. 

Jeff is the co-chair of the Firm's Practice Standards Committee and is the Firm's Loss Prevention Partner.