http://www.llrx.com/features/weststanley.htm
This is an article entitled: West Publishing Fires and Sues FindLaw Co-Founder Tim Stanley
No wonder no one seemed to be in control of anything around the time of the split. What a mess.
Here's the beginning of the article
If you accept declarations by West executives in three courts, West fired Stanley on April 7, 2003. West and Stanley signed a Separation Agreement. Since then, West sued Stanley over the agreement in federal court in Nevada. Stanley objected to jurisdiction in Nevada and said the issues belong before the courts of California. Stanley filed an action in state court in California. The Nevada court declined to give West an injunction against Stanley. West dismissed in Nevada and re-filed essentially the same complaint in federal court in Minnesota. On January 7, 2004, the court in Minnesota issued a temporary injunction against Stanley that shut down justia.com. According to West, justia.com is "for all intents and purposes FindLaw II,"2 and as such violates Stanley's covenant not to compete with West. West moved to stay Stanley's California action and leave matters in the hands of the Minnesota court.
This article relates what can be reported now about the litigation. Because the sequence of events may be revealing of their meaning, this article's basic structure is chronological rather than logical. At stages in the sequence, this article collates relevant facts, allegations, arguments, excerpts from the corpus of lawsuit papers in the three courts and information from other public records and the internet. This article uses many quotations of the parties despite the fact that this suffers the disadvantages of lacking brevity and narrative smoothness, but it enjoys the advantage of letting each party have their say their way. (Usually it will be obvious which party is speaking, and the footnotes combined with reference to the Table of Abbreviations specify each source.) Along the way, I give a few tentative assessments.
