Fisher Investments Strikes Against Former Client - a Newspaper Publisher

PRLog (Press Release) – Feb 25, 2008 – Jake Berzon, publisher of Odesskiy Listok newspaper was looking to free up some time from money management tasks to concentrate on pressing business and family matters. He thought he found his answer when he contracted with Fisher Investments - a large private investment management company in Woodside, California. Their business relationship was a short-lived one, with Berzon firing Fisher within a month of hiring them.

Berzon explains that his dissatisfaction with Fisher Investments tactics grew daily: "Flashy "personalized" documents loaded with the same regurgitated rubbish rubbed me the wrong way right away. That was followed by tomes of required additional paperwork. Then, there was the unwillingness to communicate by email and refusal to supply basic performance data. The mutual fund-like positioned account didn't seem to make much sense, either. And it seemed like every security being added to the account immediately lost in value and significantly more so than the market in general. It's like Fisher Investments knew exactly what not to buy!"

Three weeks after canceling their contract, gathering additional data and analyzing practices Fisher Investments regularly employs in managing client accounts, Berzon wrote an expose on Fisher Investments posting it in on the newspaper website. Shortage of unbiased information on Fisher Investments on the Internet, along with newspaper's popularity, soon propelled the article to the top of search engines' rankings. And that's when Fisher Investments, apparently took a note of it.

First there was a call from a Fisher Investments VP. (Berzon does not recall his name.) The VP asked what Fisher Investments could do to make Berzon happy. "There are only two things you can do, change your marketing materials to correspond to your business, or change your business to correspond to your marketing." A long pause followed... "Of course, you are not going to do either, so why bother asking?..." Berzon thought that was the last that he heard from the company.

Then in the evening of Friday, February 15th prominently among other responses, appeared a letter posted by Fisher Investments legal counsel, Fred Harring. In it Haring was threatening legal action, claiming defamation of character based on misstatement of facts; raising demands for article removal and a published retraction. Taking legal threats seriously, Odesskiy Listok staff temporarily removed the original article and replaced it with information that it is being reviewed.

To his surprise, the following Friday, Berzon received a notice from Fisher Investments outside counsel about their arbitration filing in San Francisco. This filing claims breach of contract, intentional interference with prospective business relations, defamation, trademark infringement, trademark dilution, injury to business reputation, unfair competition and unjust enrichment.

Berzon laughs it off: "If by unjust enrichment, they really mean the money that they lost for me, than, I have to say, they didn't guard it very well and their own investment strategy was the culprit. Hey, I was the one who was the victim here, the poor schmuck that fell for their song and dance. I wrote about it to let others know, not to profit or compete with Fisher. I don't do money management, although if I did, I certainly would do a much better job of it!" he adds coyly.

When asked about the seriousness of charges leveled against him, Berzon switches to a more serious tone: "Look, all these charges are obviously bogus. There were no falsifications, no accusations on my part, no writing of articles on Wikipedia about Fisher, no purchasing of Google Adwords, no pretending that I was Fisher - Ken is older and I am better looking," he can't resist inserting a joke.

"I performed no black magic here. Just wrote the facts about Fisher Investments and my opinions of them - that's all. Their $2,000 breach of contract claim - just a poor ploy to attempt to use the canceled contract's arbitration clause, keep publicity down and scare me into shutting up. Well, that's not going to happen; besides I have an email from their sales person confirming that I owe nothing! And by the way, over the past two weeks, I have done more digging, more research, more analysis and it will all be in the new article - a Fisher Investments feature story for the March issue of Odesskiy Listok."