Drone Law Practice Site Features Timely Articles

The Pillsbury law firm, which formed one of the first multidisciplinary teams focused on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) in March 2014, today announced the launch of its new UAS law blog, featuring legal perspectives from Pillsbury's UAS focus team.

"As one of the legal pioneers in this field, we're committed to remaining on the leading edge of this transformative technology," said Kenneth Quinn, former U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Chief Counsel, current General Counsel of the Flight Safety Foundation, and the head of Pillsbury's Aviation practice and Drone focus team. "Our clients now range across dozens of industries, with both civilian and governmental applications," Quinn said, "and they face significant challenges not only from a regulatory, insurance, and liability perspective, but also are dealing with enforcement, safety, security, privacy, financing, contractual, and intellectual property issues. While we can only provide legal advice to our clients, hopefully our UAS law blog will help folks understand this rapidly transforming legal landscape."

The team is comprised of internationally renowned lawyers across multiple practices and sectors, including Aviation, International Trade, Energy, Real Estate, M&A, Intellectual Property, Communications, Privacy, Global Security, Finance, Technology, Insurance and Government Contracts, located in Pillsbury's offices worldwide. The Federal Aviation Administration Modernization and Reform Act of 2012 tasked the FAA with safely integrating small drones into the National Airspace System (NAS) by 2015. The comment period on FAA's Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on this subject recently closed, with over 4,000 comments filed. In the meantime, FAA to date has granted 397 Section 333 exemptions, with over 500 in the queue. Pillsbury has filed Section 333 exemption requests for many of its clients. The goal of the blog is to help guide CEOs, CTOs, service providers, businesses, and individuals either currently using drones in civilian or military applications, or those newly interested in the commercial use of drones, through regulatory, legislative, and technological hurdles.

"Drone usage is generating a host of regulatory and other legal questions even as it creates countless business opportunities in multiple industries, such as in energy, real estate, agriculture, broadcasting, mining, academia, sports, and entertainment," said Jennifer Trock, an Aviation partner and member of the UAS focus team. "We're already helping clients in each of these areas, and are anxious to help clients position themselves to take full advantage of this game-changing technology." 

(Images from file)

FMI: www.uaslawblog.com