DURHAM, N.C. – Back in 2010, Brian Fischer and his friend, Nick Jordan, sat together on his back porch in Holly Springs, planning the launch of their app development company, Smashing Boxes.

“That afternoon, I came up with the name and he picked out the color,” he recalled. “We had a lot of fun working together.”

Fast forward to today: The company Fischer helped found recently filed a lawsuit against him and his new employer, Futures Inc., for breach of contract on several fronts in N.C. Business Court.

Smashing Boxes founder Brian Fischer and Futures’ current COO. Courtesy of LinkedIn.

Among the charges: that Fischer, while working as Smashing Boxes’ vice president of Sales, failed to act in the company’s best interests and knowingly misled the company about then client Futures’ forthcoming payments.

The company also alleges that Futures, which offers services to help military veterans transition to civilian employment, still owes more than $250,000 in unpaid work and poached Fischer in violation of their contract to complete the project in house.

Fischer denies the claims.

“We cannot litigate this in the press,” Fischer told WRAL TechWire. “The claims have no merit whatsoever.”

“Futures will vigorously defend this matter and will assert appropriate counterclaims against Smashing Boxes,” Futures added.

Smashing Boxes’ CEO Nick Jordan. Courtesy of LinkedIn.

According to Smashing Boxes lawyer John Moye, the parties had tried to find a resolution to this matter without having to go to the Business Court “but were unable to do so.”

Smashing Boxes refused to make any further comment.

“At this point it wouldn’t be prudent for us to add anything that our lawyer John Moye hasn’t already commented on,” said Dave Shepley, Smashing Boxes’ director of Sales and Marketing.

The lawsuit’s finer details

In the 19-page lawsuit, Futures approached Smashing Boxes in the summer of 2017 for assistance in designing, developing, testing and deploying a mobile job search application known as the “AZ Pipeline”. It also asked the firm to provide a design and layout for its website.

The application and website work would cost around $192,000 and $5,400, respectively, according to the lawsuit.

The parties also contractually agreed that Smashing Boxes “could not guarantee the accuracy of such estimates” due to the complexity of the work.

The suit also states that the contract also included a provision that prohibited Futures from “engaging or employing” Smashing Boxes employees for two years.

After the project commenced in August of that same year, Fischer “worked closely” with Futures on various aspects of the project. However, when Future’s failed to make timely payments, the suit alleges that Fischer “falsely assured” his company on repeated occasions that payments were forthcoming when he “knew that Futures lacked the ability to pay”.

As a result, Smashing Boxes continued to work on the project in good faith. It also claims that Futures’ engineers were “inexperienced, unengaged, or otherwise refused to work collaboratively”, forcing Smashing Boxes to add additional resources.

When payments finally started to come in, Futures still owed more than $250,000 by the end of December, the date of the last payment.

Finally, in January, the suit claims Futures “solicited and hired away” Fischer, providing a “cost-effective and efficient means to complete the very project that Smashing Boxes had been hired to perform.

“Futures’ hiring of Mr. Fischer – in direct violation of the Master Services Agreement — not only harmed Smashing Boxes’ operations by siphoning off one of its key employees, but it deprived Smashing Boxes of the benefit of the bargain”, the suit claims.

Smashing Boxes is asking for damages and attorneys’ fees.