Clients

Even the hottest initial public stock offerings can lose steam after their first day of trading. Sure, company insiders will make money selling at the opening price. And investors who used connections or big bucks to score shares at the IPO price will profit if they sell after a first-day "pop. " For everyone else, the wildly mixed record of other ballyhooed IPOs beyond their first trading session offers a lesson. It's one that should remind us that buying Facebook stock Friday provides a chance to lose money.

Enedino Neto thought his prayers were answered in 2001 when he walked into a downtown Boston law office overflowing with illegal immigrants like him, all in a frenzied rush to apply for newly available work visas that could someday lead to US citizenship. Everyone said lawyer John K. Dvorak was the one for the job. But now, 11 years later, the government is sanctioning the lawyer, and Neto is being expelled from the United States. Last week, Dvorak's Massachusetts law license was suspended for 18 months, following federal sanctions in March for failing to provide accurate...

MADRID - Spain's Banco Santander offered $1.82 billion yesterday to reimburse clients who lost money in New York financier Bernard Madoff's alleged pyramid scheme in the United States. Spain's largest bank, one of the institutions hardest hit in the scandal, said it was offering the compensation to private customers. It made no mention of institutional investors. The bank has been sued in Miami by investors who say it didn't adequately scrutinize the investments made with Madoff.

State Street Corp. lost a bid to dismiss a lawsuit by an Arkansas pension fund that says the custody bank profited off foreign-currency trades at the expense of clients. State Street's motion to dismiss the complaint brought by the Arkansas Teacher Retirement System was denied by US District Judge Mark Wolf in Boston, according to an order this week. The pension fund says State Street charged inflated rates when buying foreign currency for clients and reported deflated rates when selling, pocketing the difference between the actual and reported rates.

BROOKLINE - Stephen Johnson, a financial consultant for Charles Schwab & Co., thought he had come up with the perfect way to spend a quiet Monday in August: Lunch with a client at a seaside restaurant. But Wall Street didn't cooperate. The Dow Jones industrial average plunged 635 points that day, the biggest drop since 2008 and one in a recent series of wild days in financial markets. Johnson canceled the lunch meeting and instead spent 13 hours in the office, calming anxious clients.

NEW YORK - Goldman Sachs Group Inc. provides some of its biggest clients stock tips that come out of regular meetings held by analysts and traders, The Wall Street Journal reported. Some of the analysts’ views differ from research notes Goldman distributes to clients, the Journal said. Critics say providing early information only to certain clients hurts customers who are not given an opportunity to trade on ideas from meetings. Brokerage firms can share information with clients as they wish, so long as their analysts’ stock recommendations don’t contradict...

RE "IN fining mental-health provider, OSHA sends a strong message" (Editorial, Aug. 12): The National Association of Social Workers, Massachusetts chapter, has considered safety for social workers and human service providers a critical priority for several years. Our state-wide task force on maximizing social worker safety in the workplace is devoted to creating policies, procedures, and programs that focus on keeping workers and the clients they serve safe. In January, we filed legislation that would require human service employers to conduct workplace safety...

Watertown ad agency Allen & Gerritsen, also known as a&g, said it is adding Boston Interiors, Bank Rhode Island, and Museum of Science, Boston to its client roster. The three accounts were previously handled by Gearon Hoffman, a Cambridge ad agency that is winding down operations, a&g said. Billings for the accounts are not being disclosed. Kathy Carino is joining a&g from Gearon Hoffman, and she will manage the Boston Interiors, Bank Rhode Island, and Museum of Science accounts, a&g said.

(From left) Board members Willliam Boynton, Hingham, and Christopher Sherman, Duxbury, help serve lunch to HomeStart success stories By Jessica Bartlett, Town Correspondent When Hingham resident and HomeStart board member William Boynton walked into the HomeStart's Annual Winter Celebration at the State House, he knew he had done good work. The event, held this past Wednesday, celebrated more than 150 HomeStart clients who have successfully moved into and maintained permanent housing through the Boston-based organization, which works with...

NEW YORK - Robert G. Morvillo, a prominent New York trial lawyer who pioneered the practice of white-collar criminal defense and whose client list included colorful celebrities, powerful politicians, and billionaire businessmen, died on Saturday at his home in Rockville Center, N.Y. He was 73. He died in his sleep while recovering from a recent operation, according to his law firm, Morvillo, Abramowitz, Grand, Iason, Anello & Bohrer. Mr. Morvillo's high-profile clients included Martha Stewart in her trial on...

- State Street Corp. lost a bid to dismiss a lawsuit by an Arkansas pension fund that says the custody bank profited off foreign-currency trades at the expense of clients. State Street's motion to dismiss the complaint brought by the Arkansas Teacher Retirement System was denied by US District Judge Mark Wolf in Boston, according to an order. The pension fund says State Street charged inflated rates when buying foreign currency for clients and reported deflated rates when selling, pocketing the difference between the actual and reported rates.

You wouldn't expect anybody at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to go looking for a less powerful computer. But there is an effort afoot at the university's Sloan School of Management to move faculty and staff away from full-fledged desktop computers and onto dumber, network-based devices known as thin clients. It's part of a larger movement toward "cloud computing" - processing files and other software on large, shared server computers, reducing the need to pack a lot of processing horsepower into each user's machine.

ORLANDO - Maryland teachers were instructed to engage children by crouching and speaking to them at eye level. Chevrolet dealers were taught to think in theater metaphors: onstage, where smiles greet potential buyers, and offstage, where sales representatives can take out-of-sight cigarette breaks. A Florida children's hospital was advised to welcome patients in an entertaining way, prompting it to employ a ukulele-playing greeter dressed in safari gear. These personal service tips came from the Disney Institute, the low-profile consulting division of Walt...

A phony Hingham psychic was arrested on Saturday after allegedly swindling a 69-year-old Pembroke woman out of more than $7,000 by claiming that she needed the money to lift a curse, according to Hingham police. Tiffany Crystal Smith, 24, was arrested at her psychic business at 49 Whiting St. in Hingham, which is also her home. Smith, who police said works under the name "Sophie," was charged with two counts of larceny over $250, larceny over $250 by false pretenses, larceny from a person over 65 and conspiracy.

Goldman Sachs agreed Thursday to pay securities regulators $22 million to settle allegations that it did not have adequate policies in place to stop stock research tips from being passed inappropriately to its biggest clients. In its complaint, the Securities and Exchange Commission said that top clients received preferential treatment through Goldman's "trading huddles," in which the bank's research analysts met frequently to develop trading tips that were passed on to the firm's traders and then select clients.

Judging like an only child If you're trying to predict the Supreme Court's verdict on the health care overhaul, you might want to examine one heretofore unconsidered factor: whether each justice has older or younger siblings. A political scientist at the University of North Carolina analyzed the votes of justices from 1873 through 1970 in cases that contemplated applying the Bill of Rights to the states, which constituted a major shift in legal doctrine. He found a strong correlation between birth order and support for the status quo. Only 43 percent of the votes of first-born/only children were in...

FactSet Research Systems Inc. said Tuesday that earnings increased 12 percent for its fiscal third quarter as the company added clients and its annual subscription value grew. The Norwalk, Conn., financial data provider reported earnings of $43.3 million, or 92 cents per share, for the three months ended May 31. That compares with $38.7 million, or 81 cents per share, for the same quarter in 2010. Revenue increased 14.6 percent to $183.6 million. Analysts expected earnings of 92 cents per share on revenue of $183.1 million, according to FactSet.

(Photo courtesy of Koko FitClub) Employees inspecting new equipment recently at the Koko FirClub in West Roxbury. By Amanda Ostuni, Globe Correspondent This spring, West Roxbury will have a new gym, in Shaw's Plaza, that takes "personal" training in a new direction -- by using high-tech gadgets to direct a client's workout. The Koko FitClub, at 77 Spring St., is part of a chain of fitness clubs coming to Greater Boston that customizes workouts via a machine called a Smartrainer.

It's a Wednesday afternoon in Newton Centre, and James Phillips is learning how to see without seeing. With a blindfold on and instructor at his side, the functionally blind 21-year-old is tapping and sliding his Hoover cane — the red-tipped white aid — down crowded sidewalks, across major roads, and along the bumpy edge of a T platform. This is all part of a training regimen at the nearby Carroll Center for the Blind, where Phillips, who comes from upstate New York, is spending a few months.

NEW YORK- Bank of New York Mellon Corp., the world's largest custody bank, contested US claims that it defrauded clients in foreign-exchange transactions and asked a court to dismiss the government's lawsuit. BNY Mellon said disclosures that it made to clients about the trading negate the claim that the bank engaged in a scheme to defraud, according to a filing Tuesday in federal district court in Manhattan. "A party that knows exactly what it is getting, and at what price, cannot have been defrauded," the bank said.