Newly formed MSSB signs recruitment protocol

The new Morgan Stanley Smith Barney has signed the industry’s recruitment protocol. The protocol lets brokers take basic customer contact information with them when they change firms, thus helping to avoid litigation over alleged theft of trade secrets and confidential client information. New York-based MSSB became an official signatory to the pact yesterday when Morgan Stanley and Citigroup Inc.’s Smith Barney brokerage unit closed on their joint venture. The action “should prove comforting to brokers considering a transition out of” MSSB, said Patrick J. Burns, founder of an eponymous law firm in Beverly Hills, Calif., who works with independent firms on employment matters. There had been some industry concern about whether the combined entity would be joining the protocol, he wrote in an e-mail. MSSB signed up because “it’s the right thing to do for clients,” MSSB spokesman Jim Wiggins wrote in an e-mail. The protocol was begun in 2004 by Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc., UBS Financial Services Inc. and Citigroup, all of New York. Many smaller firms have signed the pact in recent months, eager to recruit refugee brokers from the struggling wirehouses.