Keith Schooley has opened an official Facebook page for "Merrill Lynch: The Cost Could Be Fatal," his first-person account of the nine years he spent fighting the largest firm on Wall Street. The page is live now, and readers who follow the case are being asked to like and share it so the account reaches people who have never heard of it.
The announcement matters beyond one book. Schooley's story turns on a question that affects anyone who invests: whether claims against brokerage firms should be decided by arbitrators rather than juries. The book opens with a foreword by his former attorney, Stephen Jones, who states plainly that Schooley lost and argues the real subject is not one man's case but that arbitration question. Jones tells readers that each of them becomes "one of the jurors he never had."
Schooley joined Merrill Lynch in July 1991 as a financial consultant trainee in a small Oklahoma branch office. He scored 93.2 percent on the Series 7 exam and ranked among the top ten rookie producers in his division. Fourteen months later he was out of the securities industry for good.
The book's title comes from the firm's own general counsel, who warned in a 1992 employee publication that letting integrity take second place to revenue would cost the firm more than dollars: "The cost could be fatal." Citing the firm's written requirement that employees report improprieties to whatever level of management is necessary, Schooley wrote a four-page memo to his branch manager, then a 31-page letter to all thirteen members of the board of directors.
What followed, as Schooley tells it, was two internal investigations, inquiries by the SEC, the NYSE, the NASD and two state insurance departments, his own termination, a forced move into binding securities arbitration, a four-day hearing, and more than a decade of appeals. The arbitration panel awarded him nothing. Schooley does not hide that result; his account reconstructs the dispute from his memos, letters, regulatory correspondence, recorded telephone conversations and the arbitration hearing transcript, including testimony from the firm's own compliance and legal executives.
The Facebook page is intended to put that record in front of a wider audience, and the book is available at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HKY222R6. For employees who might report wrongdoing, the case raises the stakes of doing so: Schooley's career ended within fourteen months of his arrival, and his claims were ultimately resolved behind closed arbitration doors rather than before a jury.
Schooley grew up in Oklahoma City, earned a B.B.A. from the University of Oklahoma and an M.B.A. from Oklahoma State University, and worked in oil and gas before turning to Wall Street. He lives in Enid, Oklahoma.
