MANHATTAN—Wall Street owes investors almost $400 million dollars. The question is, will you be getting any of that money?

On April 28, in a landmark settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 10 securities firms agreed to pony up $1.4 billion to lay to rest accusations of supervisory failings and rampant conflicts of interest in the advice they gave to investors. As is usual in settlements like these, no one admitted or denied any wrongdoing.

Roughly $400 million of the money is to be awarded to individual investors. But as the precise formula for calculating payouts has yet to be finalized, exactly who will be entitled to receive and how much is still very much up in the air, and there are several hundred stocks involved.

For an easy answer to whether you might be entitled to any of this money, visit www.claimscompensation.com. Claims Compensation Bureau (CCB), based in Blue Bell, Penn., has compiled a list of the stocks that fall under this settlement and the relevant dates. If you owned one of the stocks during the time period designated in the settlement, you may eventually get some money.

CCB has, in fact, made a business out of a service that has to date been provided largely by lawyers. Not everyone can afford a lawyer for this kind of effort, and for small shareholders whose claims don't add up to much, it wouldn't be worth the fees. But in the course of 20 years in business, CCB has developed a kind of mass-market contingency-fee-based system for filing investor claims that even small-time stockholders can afford. There's no up-front fee; the company takes 25 percent of any awards it wins for its clients.

That might sound like a lot, but for many losing investors, 75 percent is better than nothing. "By using our firm, 100 percent of our clients file claim forms," says Brad Heffler, CEO of CCB. "Some of [the forms] are very complex. Some of them need to be filed electronically if the investor has more than a certain threshold of transactions."

Brad Maione, spokesman for the New York State attorney general's office, is hesitant to endorse or even acknowledge the presence of any such businesses locally, but he does have some advice. "I wouldn't recommend working with an agency that wants any money up front," he warns. "It could be a scam." Maione's suggestion is to pay attention to reports in the media about how to get what is owed to you and seek help from a lawyer. Combing the media for information takes a lot of effort and savvy on the part of the investor, and there's still the lawyer's fees.

These days, CCB has a heck of a good business. Settlement amounts are rising, with the median having nearly doubled since 1995, to $16.5 million, according to National Economic Research Associates. From 1999 to 2000, CCB's revenues rose from less than $1 million to more than $10 million. Wouldn't it be nice to have the other 75 percent of that?