Keith Schooley, a former financial consultant trainee at Merrill Lynch, has opened an official Facebook page for his book, 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 Schooley is asking readers who follow the case—and anyone who believes an employee should be able to report wrongdoing without losing a career—to like and share it. Every share, he says, puts the account in front of readers who have never heard of it.
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. The book opens with a foreword by his former attorney, Stephen Jones, who states plainly that Schooley lost, and who argues the real subject is not one man’s case but whether investors should have claims decided by arbitrators rather than juries. Jones tells readers that each of them becomes “one of the jurors he never had.”
The book reconstructs the dispute from Schooley’s memos, letters, regulatory correspondence, recorded telephone conversations and the transcript of the arbitration hearing, including the testimony of the firm’s own compliance and legal executives. It is available for purchase at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HKY222R6.
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.
The launch of the Facebook page matters because it signals a renewed push to bring Schooley’s story to a wider audience at a time when whistleblower protections and the use of mandatory arbitration in the securities industry remain subjects of public debate. By making his documentation and arbitration record available, Schooley adds a detailed case study to the conversation about whether employees who report improprieties are adequately protected and whether investors are better served by arbitration or by juries. For readers, the page offers a direct way to engage with the case and to share it with others.
