People Driven Technology Lawsuits: Ohio and Illinois Cases

The People Driven Technology lawsuits are a series of federal cases filed between December 2021 and April 2024 in which Presidio, Inc. accused PDT and several former Presidio employees of misappropriating trade secrets, breaching non-compete and non-solicitation agreements, and poaching customers after PDT was founded by the same family that built Netech Corporation, the Michigan IT integrator Presidio had acquired for $250 million in 2015. The lead case in the Southern District of Ohio ended in October 2023 with a stipulated permanent injunction and dismissal with prejudice. A separate Presidio suit against PDT was filed in the Northern District of Illinois in April 2024.

Why Presidio Sued

Presidio Infrastructure Solutions LLC and Presidio Holdings, Inc. bought Netech Corporation on December 31, 2015 for $250 million.¹ Netech had been founded in Grand Rapids in 1996 by James Engen and his partners. As part of the sale, James Engen and his sons, Ryan and Timothy, agreed not to compete against any Presidio entity for five years.² Presidio also took on Netech’s existing employment paperwork, including confidentiality and non-solicitation agreements signed by a number of Netech employees.

Almost exactly five years later, in late December 2020, the Engens founded People Driven Technology. PDT began operating in April 2021, and its own marketing described the company as a “reboot of Netech” and “Netech 2.0.” Former Netech employees who had been working at Presidio since the acquisition began leaving to join PDT. The court record describes it as “part of a larger exodus of employees from PNS, across both engineering and sales teams, rooted in broader management issues.”¹ By mid-2022, PDT had hired nearly forty former Presidio employees.³

What Presidio Alleged Was Taken

Presidio’s core theory was that departing employees did not simply leave with industry know-how. According to court filings, Presidio presented forensic evidence showing that before leaving, the individual defendants backed up tens of thousands of files from their work laptops onto personal USB drives, external hard drives, and personal email accounts.¹

The alleged trade secrets fell into three groups:

Pricing and margin data, including Excel spreadsheets covering 32 customers and representing over $10 million in annual revenue.
Technical designs such as Cisco Commerce Workspace downloads, network diagrams, call flow diagrams, python files, and bills of materials.
Client records, including proposal documents, contact lists, and detailed account histories with specific customer network configurations.

Presidio alleged that once the employees arrived at PDT, they moved the files to their new work computers, uploaded them to shared company storage, and used the information to prepare competing bids for the same customers. The court record points to Joseph Schaumleffel circulating a Presidio proposal document among PDT colleagues while preparing a bid for Avita Health, and Michael Martin accessing Presidio files on “The Andersons” while PDT pursued the same account.¹

The defendants disputed the characterization. They argued that much of the material, especially pricing data from 2015 through 2017, was stale and no longer qualified as a trade secret. They also said some documents had been supplied directly by clients rather than taken from Presidio’s systems. Thomas Schlotterer, for example, argued that files relating to Premier Bank had been sent back to him by the client itself, after he had originally provided them while still at Presidio.¹

The Ohio Case and How It Ended

On December 14, 2021, Presidio filed suit against PDT and four individual former employees in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio: Jeffery Ely, Michael Martin, Joseph Schaumleffel, and Thomas Schlotterer.⁴ All four had signed confidentiality and non-solicitation agreements during their Netech days, agreements Presidio said it had inherited through the acquisition.² The complaint brought counts for breach of contract, trade secret misappropriation under the federal Defend Trade Secrets Act and state law, trademark infringement under the Lanham Act, unfair competition, tortious interference, and unjust enrichment. In March 2022, Chief Judge Algenon L. Marbley entered stipulated preliminary injunctions against Schaumleffel and PDT, along with an agreed preliminary injunction regarding Schlotterer.⁵

A related dispute reached Ohio by way of Michigan. In July 2022, former Presidio employees David Hatton and Ryan Heidenreich filed a preemptive lawsuit in the Eastern District of Michigan asking a court to declare their old non-compete and non-solicitation agreements unenforceable. Both had resigned from Presidio in late June 2022 and started at PDT in early July, and Presidio had sent them letters asserting that they were barred from soliciting Presidio employees and customers, with Hatton also barred from competing.³ The Hatton case was transferred to the Southern District of Ohio on November 3, 2022 and consolidated with the lead case as a member case (No. 2:22-cv-03838).⁶

On August 11, 2023, Chief Judge Marbley ruled on cross-motions for summary judgment. The decision cut both ways. The court granted PDT’s motion to preclude certain evidence, granted the summary judgment motions of PDT and the individual defendants in part, and denied Presidio’s motions for partial summary judgment.⁵ Several Presidio claims were dismissed with prejudice:

Breach of contract (Count 1) against the individual defendants.
Certain trade secret claims (Counts 2 and 3) for a subset of the alleged trade secrets.
Trademark infringement under Section 32 of the Lanham Act (Count 4).
Unfair competition and tortious interference (Counts 7 and 9) as to Ely, Martin, and Schlotterer.
Unjust enrichment (Count 8) as to all individual defendants.

Other claims survived, including some trade secret misappropriation counts. The court accepted the proprietary nature of certain customer and technical data while finding that genuine disputes of fact remained over whether some information was stale or independently acquired.¹

The parties did not try the surviving claims. On August 15, 2023, Judge Marbley ordered the case dismissed without prejudice and directed the parties to submit a dismissal order with prejudice within 45 days. The court entered a stipulated permanent injunction on October 18, 2023, and on October 20, 2023 Presidio filed a stipulation of dismissal with prejudice, formally closing the lead Ohio case.⁵ The specific terms of any settlement have not been made public in the court record.

The 2024 Illinois Case

The Ohio resolution did not end the legal conflict. On April 11, 2024, Presidio Holdings Inc. filed a new lawsuit against People Driven Technology in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, assigned to Judge Edmond E. Chang (Case No. 1:24-cv-02912).⁷ Based on available docket information, the Illinois case remained in its early procedural stages after the complaint was filed and summons issued. The specific claims and any rulings in the Illinois case are not detailed in available court records.

1
Casemine. Presidio, Inc. v. People Driven Tech., Inc., 686 F.Supp.3d 652 (S.D. Ohio 2023)
2
vLex. Presidio, Inc. v. People Driven Tech., Inc.
3
GovInfo. Hatton et al. v. Presidio, Inc. et al., Case No. 22-11564
4
GovInfo. Presidio, Inc. et al v. People Driven Technology, Inc. et al, Case No. 2:21-cv-05779
5
PACER Monitor. Presidio, Inc. et al v. People Driven Technology, Inc. et al
6
Casemine. Presidio, Inc. v. Hatton, Case No. 2:22-cv-03838
7
PACER Monitor. Presidio Holdings Inc. et al v. People Driven Technology, Inc. et al