Drone Startup, PrecisionHawk, Sued for Breach of Contract and Unfair and Deceptive Trade Practices
PrecisionHawk, a leading company in the commercial drone services industry, has been sued for nine breaches of contract and for unfair and deceptive trade practices.
The lawsuit was filed earlier this month in Wake County, North Carolina Superior Court by the law firm of Thomas K. Lindgren, on behalf of the plaintiffs, JP Business Group and Terravative.
An overview of the lawsuit:
- PrecisionHawk acquired Terraserver.com and other assets from the plaintiffs in 2015 under an agreement which required PrecisionHawk to use best efforts to generate and pay commissions to the plaintiffs for six years on the sales of commissionable products and services through Terraserver.com and all other PrecisionHawk sales channels.
- The commissionable products and services were defined in the agreement to include any and all products and services that utilized satellite data in any manner and also included products and services that utilized terrain data, elevation data, digital terrain models, and digital surface models.
- The plaintiffs allege, among other things, that PrecisionHawk deliberately misclassified sales data, under reported, and under paid commissions, neglected their obligations to market and sell certain commissionable products, and withheld information to conceal their breaches of contract.
JP Business Group’s managing partner, James Burns, released the following statement:
“It’s disappointing and frustrating anytime a business fails to follow through on their promises, but even more so with PrecisionHawk as they had an exceptional founding team that I believed in and trusted to follow through on the promises they made. Unfortunately, the founding CEO was replaced within months after our deal and PrecisionHawk is now on its 4th CEO in the last five years.
We tried for more than 6 months to resolve the issues directly with PrecisionHawk but were unable to reach a resolution which has forced us to file this lawsuit.
I am hopeful that PrecisionHawk will now dedicate proper time and attention to this matter so that we can reach an amicable resolution and avoid a multiple-year court battle, but we are willing and prepared to go to trial as needed to obtain a fair outcome.”
