News & Events
Uniden awaits penalty in dispute over phone deal
March 20, 2008 | DAILY BUSINESS REVIEW
By John Pacenti
When it comes to electronics, consumers can be a fickle bunch.
Industry estimates are that 6 percent to 10 percent of all electronic items purchased are returned. Most items have nothing wrong with them. Customers have buyer's remorse or they don’t like the colors or reject them as unwanted gifts.
But returns for electronics are big business, a Miami federal jury recently learned. Jurors found the U.S. subsidiary of Japanese electronics maker Uniden liable in a dispute with a Miami company over refurbished phones.
Now, Uniden could end up paying millions to Topp, the defunct company that refurbished returned Uniden cordless telephones and sold them in the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean.
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"There's a theme here, a repeated theme that Uniden makes a deal, reaches an understanding, and then unilaterally or secretly changes it in its own favor or ignores the deal that it made," said attorney Jeffrey Crockett, who represented Topp for the Coffey Burlington firm in Miami, during closing arguments on March 10. Paul Schwiep and David Zack of the firm also represented Topp.
In court, Crockett said Uniden stood to make three or four times as much money by keeping the good phones. “It was a temptation too great for a company motivated by greed,” the attorney told the jury.
It was not all good news for the Miami company, though.
The jury also found after a six-day trial that Topp violated its contract with Uniden by not paying $2.2 million for phones it had received during the dispute.
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