Richard Frankowski founded The Frankowski Firm in Birmingham, Alabama, and has spent more than twenty-five years representing investors nationwide in FINRA arbitration and securities litigation — against brokerages, investment advisors, and the firms responsible for supervising them.
He is co-author of the American Bar Association’s Practitioner’s Guide to Securities Arbitration (2013), the ABA’s working text on the forum, used by law-school investor clinics as a textbook. He also co-authored the PIABA Foundation’s Investor’s Guide to Protecting Your Financial Future (2016), written for the people on the other side of the table. He serves on the board of the PIABA Foundation and holds Martindale-Hubbell’s AV Preeminent rating, its highest mark for legal ability and ethics.
Before the law, he took a master’s degree at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service — an international education that turns out to be relevant to a practice whose clients now write from Ajijic, Cuenca, and Chiang Mai. He holds a JD and an MBA from the University of Alabama, is licensed in Alabama, Florida, and Texas, and passed the Series 65 examination that investment advisers themselves must sit.
Why expats
The clients who assumed there was no one to call.
We built this practice after a pattern became impossible to ignore. Retirees in Ajijic and Chiang Mai were writing to us about frozen accounts, forced sales, and income products that had stopped producing income — and nearly every one of them began the same way: I assumed that because I live here, there was nothing I could do. They had waited a year, sometimes two, on that assumption. Some had waited past the deadline.
The assumption is wrong. The account is American, the broker is American, and the forum was built to be national. We handle these cases the way we have always handled cases for clients in other states: on documents, by phone and video, in the client’s hours. The only thing we ask an expat client to do differently is to write sooner.
Credentials
On the record.
- AV Preeminent 5.0 — Martindale-Hubbell
- Super Lawyers 2012–2016, 2021–2025
- AVVO Superb 10/10
- PIABA Foundation — Board of Directors
- Lead Counsel Rated — LawInfo
- Georgetown MA, School of Foreign Service
- University of Alabama JD + MBA
- Licensed: Alabama · Florida · Texas
- Series 65