Bakhtiari & Harrison, P.C.

Focus and practice areas

Securities law is a narrow field, and Bakhtiari & Harrison works inside it from two directions. The firm represents investors who have lost money, and it represents the brokers and advisers who sell securities for a living. Both sides of that work run through the same forums.

Claims go before FINRA, the American Arbitration Association, and state and federal courts. The firm takes clients nationwide from its Studio City office in California. Investor cases run on a contingency fee arrangement.

Investor claims

The investor side covers broker fraud, unsuitable recommendations, unauthorized trading, and churning. Elder financial fraud and Ponzi scheme losses also fall within it.

Product failure claims make up another part of the work. The firm names non-traded REITs, structured notes, variable annuities, and private placements as the instruments it litigates over. These are the products that tend to surface after a market drop, when an investor reads a statement and finds the risk was never what they thought.

Work for financial professionals

Brokers and advisers come to Bakhtiari & Harrison with a different set of problems. FINRA expungement petitions, promissory note defense, and U5 defamation claims are three of them.

The firm also takes employment disputes, outside business activity matters, and regulatory defense. A U5 filing follows a registered person for the rest of their career, so the stakes on that side of the practice are longer-term than a single case file suggests.

How the team is built

Two partners run the firm: Ryan Bakhtiari and David Harrison. Both hold appointments as FINRA securities arbitrators, which means both have sat in the chair deciding these cases as well as arguing them.

In my opinion, that dual role is the most useful thing on the firm's page. An advocate who has served as an arbitrator knows how a panel reads an exhibit and where a hearing tends to lose the room. Very few securities practices can say that about every lawyer on the letterhead.

Ryan Bakhtiari

Bakhtiari chaired the FINRA National Arbitration and Mediation Committee from 2013 to 2017. That committee sits at the policy level of the forum where most of these disputes are resolved.

He also held the presidency of PIABA, the Public Investors Advocate Bar Association, for the 2011 to 2012 term. He is admitted in California, New York, Texas, the District of Columbia, and multiple federal courts, which is an unusually wide admission footprint for a two-partner firm.

His name appears on Hosier v. Citigroup, a case that produced a $54.1 million award. The firm cites it directly on its attorney page.

David Harrison

Harrison started out on the sell side. He worked as a Series 7 licensed registered representative at Shearson Lehman Brothers before he practiced law.

From there he became an assistant district attorney in New York City, then moved to Morgan Stanley Dean Witter as in-house counsel. He now represents investors, and he is admitted in California and New York. He belongs to PIABA.

That path matters in a securities case. Someone who sold the products, prosecuted criminal matters, and then defended a wirehouse from the inside has seen the same fact pattern from three positions. Compliance memos and supervisory records read differently to a lawyer who once wrote them.

What the record shows

The firm states it has recovered more than $250 million for investors over four decades. That figure is the firm's own, and it appears consistently across the home, attorneys, and contact pages.

Four decades of continuous work in one area of law is worth pausing on. FINRA arbitration has changed substantially in that time. A practice that has stayed with it through those changes has watched the rules and the products turn over more than once.

The Hosier award is the single named result on the site. As a reviewer, I prefer a firm that names one case with a citation over a firm that gestures at many without any. A named case can be looked up, which is the point.

How the practice is structured

One office, two partners, one field of law. The firm operates from a single location on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City and takes clients across the country, which is workable in securities practice because FINRA arbitration hearings are scheduled by the forum in the customer's home region.

Client contact goes to the partners. In a two-lawyer firm the person evaluating the claim is the person who will argue it, and there is no layer of associates between the two.

The firm maintains profiles on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, and YouTube. For a securities practice, the YouTube presence in particular suggests an interest in explaining how arbitration works to people who have never been through it.

Who this office fits

An investor who suspects a broker put them into something unsuitable will find a firm that handles exactly that claim. The same applies to someone whose account was traded without authorization, or whose parent lost savings to a scheme sold as safe.

Registered representatives are the other half of the client base. An adviser facing a promissory note claim after leaving a firm, or one carrying a disclosure on their record they believe is inaccurate, is dealing with the kind of matter Bakhtiari & Harrison takes regularly.

Initial consultations carry no charge, and the firm handles investor matters on contingency. Anyone weighing whether a loss is worth pursuing can get a read before committing.

Reading the firm's own disclosures

Some things the website leaves out. There is no founding year given, though the four-decade claim implies a start somewhere in the mid-1980s. Law schools and admission years for both partners are absent from the attorney biographies.

What the site does document is verifiable. FINRA committee chairmanships, PIABA officer terms, bar admissions by jurisdiction, and a named case with an award figure are all checkable against public records. As a reviewer, I weight that kind of detail heavily, because it exposes the firm to correction if wrong.

The credentials themselves also carry independent weight. FINRA appoints its arbitrators and its committee chairs, and PIABA elects its presidents. Bakhtiari & Harrison did not confer those roles on itself.