If you are weighing a move, one document decides more about your first week at a new firm than the recruiting deal ever will. It is short — a few pages, not a statute — and almost every summary skips the part that matters most: how to find out whether it applies to you at all. Here is how the Broker Protocol actually works.
Why the Protocol exists.
Before 2004, an advisor changing firms was a lawsuit waiting to be filed. The old firm would seek a restraining order, the new firm would fund the defense, and the clients sat frozen while a court decided whether their advisor could call them. The Protocol was three of those firms — Smith Barney, Merrill Lynch, and UBS — calling a truce, to protect clients' privacy and their freedom to choose who advises them.
Understand what it is not: not a law, not a FINRA rule, not an SEC regulation. It is a private, reciprocal agreement, and it binds only the firms that have signed it. That single fact drives everything else.
What you can actually take.
Exactly five pieces of client information, and only for clients you personally serviced.
- Client name and address.
- Phone number and email address.
- Account title — how the account is registered, not the account number and not the balance.
Those five fields let you do one thing: contact a client, tell them you have moved, and let them decide. They do not let you pre-fill transfer paperwork or bring over a book in a spreadsheet. The "personally serviced" limit is just as load-bearing — inherited and shared households are where member firms still fight, decided by the record, not the memory.
Follow the document exactly, between two member firms, and a routine departure stays routine; improvise, and it converts into a lawsuit.
Why advisors still get sued.
Almost always for self-inflicted wounds: emailing a client list home "as a backup," taking account numbers to speed up paperwork, telling favorite clients before resigning, or assuming the Protocol applied when one firm was not a member. It also carves out raiding — an orchestrated team lift-out lets a firm seek relief even against a member — and separate partnership or team agreements survive intact.
The exact process on resignation day.
The order matters. First, resign in writing, delivered to local branch management — not an email to HR, not a call to your manager's cell. Second, hand over a copy of the client information you are taking. This is the two-list detail do-it-yourselfers miss: the list you walk out with holds the five fields, while the branch copy holds the five fields plus the account numbers. Get those backwards and you have handed your old firm its lawsuit. Third, and only then, contact clients.
How to check whether a firm is covered.
Your firm's membership is a lookup, not a memory. The administrator, J.S. Held, publishes the member list — the October 2025 edition ran to more than two thousand brokerages and RIA firms — and it is a living document. Pull the current list, confirm both your firm and the destination are on it, and re-pull it the morning you resign. Both firms must be members on the day you move; that is the entire test, and it has to be true twice. Departures happen at the top: Morgan Stanley withdrew in late 2017, UBS followed weeks later, and Citigroup — a founding parent — exited in early 2018. The firms most people assume are covered include some that wrote the rules and then left. If your firm is not a member, your employment agreement governs instead.