Often times when two companies have a serious enough dispute, they turn to the court system.
It’s a process that should, in theory, bring about justice.
Sometimes that justice is served.
Sometimes it isn’t.
And apparently sometimes even when it is, it still isn’t.
Walking out of the Florida courthouse on an August afternoon in the year 2000, Nicholas
Stracick and Edward Russell had good reason to be happy.
They had sued The Walt Disney Company and just won $240 million, or so they thought.
Edward Russell was an architect from New York who had experience with sports projects, and
Nicholas Stracick was a former baseball umpire from Ontario with a passion for sports.
In 1987 the two had founded All Pro Sports Camps Inc. with the hopes of designing and
planning year-round sports camps for children.
They certainly didn’t lack ambition, because the following year in 1988, they decided to
go big by pitching a project that they felt would perfect for Walt Disney World.
Their idea was a 150-acre sports complex called Sports Island.
It would feature fields and stadiums that could be fit for thirty different sports.
The general business plan would be that Disney would lease All-Pro the land but design and
build the complex themselves, as well as provide hotels and transportation.
All-Pro, meanwhile, would be responsible for raising the financing to build Sports Island
and would then manage and operate the complex after it opened.
Now, according to All-Pro, they reached out to Steve Wilson who worked with the Walt Disney
Company as a golf executive, since the resort has multiple courses.
After discussing the idea with Wilson, he allegedly set up a meeting for them with one
of Disney’s key architect’s Wing Chao.
It was there that All-Pro claims that they offered Disney a 350-page business plan, 200
preview slides, and a 150-pound scale model of the proposed facility.
They claimed the meeting went well and that Chao liked the idea.
So All-Pro continued to develop the concept and even went as far as beginning their search
for corporate financing.
However, things came to an unexpected halt in February of 1989, when All-Pro received
a rejection letter from Disney that stated “Our plate is full and consequently can’t
entertain such proposals for some time in the future.”
According to All-Pro, they were never given back the 350-page plan book, 200 slides, or
the scale model that they would later value at $200,000.
It seemed like an opportunity that simply came and went.
They tried for the big fish and failed and, you know, sometimes it’s just bad timing.
Then, four years later, Disney announced that they intended to build a $100 million sports
complex on Walt Disney World property, with a planned opening date of 1996.
Stracick and Russell began to notice that more and more of the complex’s details line
up with their old pitch for Sports Island, and that is when they decided to sue Disney.
In 1994 All Pro Sports Camps Inc sued The Walt Disney Company, Walt Disney World, and
the Disney Development Company in federal court for copyright infringement, claiming
that the design for Disney’s upcoming sports complex was lifted from their Sports Island pitch.
It was a misstep on All Pro’s part because after two years of leadup the federal judge
dismissed the case.
She ruled that no reasonable jury could find the All-Pro plans, layout, or architecture,
to be substantially similar to Disney‘s.
The two walked away from the loss figuring that the issue was the manner in which they
sued Disney.
So in 1997, they tried again.
This time they brought the suit to the Florida State court, and they sued Disney for theft
of a business idea as well as fraud, theft of trade secrets, breaking an implied contract,
and breaching a confidential relationship.
The idea was that it would be easier to prove these more specific claims than it clearly
was to try and argue copyright infringement as a whole.
All-Pro, perhaps thinking quite a bit of their idea, was seeking $1.4 billion in damages.
Cases like these tend to take a long time, and so it wasn’t until July of 2000 that
the trial actually began.
All-Pro claimed that there were 88 similarities in total between their plans for Sports Island
and what was, by that point, the ESPN Wide World of Sports.
For instance, they highlighted that the pitch for their complex involved having facilities
to support specifically 30 sports, which is the same number of sports Disney claimed their
complex would also support.
They also noted that the two plans not only featured the same number of football fields
and soccer fields, but that both plans had baseball stadiums with exactly 3,000 parking spaces.
All-Pro also had the testimony of Steve Wilson, who had admitted that he had intimate knowledge
of the Sports Island plan and acted as an intermediary between All-Pro and Disney executives.
And while Disney did reveal that they reprimanded Wilson for violating their company conflict-of-interest
policy, they still assigned him as project coordinator while developing the Wide World
of Sports.
On the flip side, Disney claimed that they were planning a sport complex years before
the Sports Island pitch.
Former NFL linebacker Reggie Williams, who Disney had spearheading the ESPN Wide World
of Sports project testified that he had no prior knowledge of Sports Island.
Furthermore, Disney architect Wing Chao testified that he had no recollection of the Sports
Island meeting back in the 80s.
Even at the top, Disney CEO Michael Eisner claimed that he had never heard of All Pro
Sports Camps until that very deposition.
Disney’s general council, Lou Meisinger, argued that “The only arguable similarity
is that Disney copied the idea for a sports theme park.
That idea is as old as ancient Greece and belongs to the public.”
Yet there was some pretty damning evidence.
As All Pro’s lawyers pointed out, Disney provided their copies of the Sports Island
plans during the discovery phase of the lawsuit, which means somebody at Disney did see the
plans for Sports Island and went as far as either keeping or making copies of it.
When questioned about it, Disney executives had no recollection over who copied the plans.
The trial lasted a month, and after both sides gave their closing arguments, the jury of
six spent two days deliberating.
After those two days, they delivered a unanimous guilty ruling on 6 of the 7 charges and awarded
All-Pro $240 million.
Not only that, but they ruled that Disney’s conduct was willful and malicious, which meant
that a judge at a later hearing could triple the award if they chose to.
Disney unsurprisingly vowed to appeal the ruling and even went as far as arguing that
the $240 million valuation of the award was unreasonable because the ESPN Wide World of Sports technically
wasn’t profitable at that point.
That November a circuit judge upheld the verdict, and so Disney took the ruling to the 5th District
Court of Appeals.
Now, this is where a legal ruling can turn into a pyrrhic victory.
Appeals can be a lengthy and expensive process and sometimes getting the money you won could
be just as difficult, if not more so, than winning it in the first place.
The details at this point start to get vague since both parties stopped commenting on it,
but for one reason or another, All Pro Sports Camps Inc and The Walt Disney Company settled
out of court.
It’s possible that All Pro felt that it was a faster way of actually getting a payout
from Disney, or they could have decided that it wasn’t worth the gamble of seeing through
the appeals.
Whatever the reason, the two settled for an undisclosed amount in September of 2002.
One attorney who had defended theme parks in the past spoke with The Orlando Sentinel
as an anonymous source and estimated that the settlement was probably in the ballpark
of $10 million.
They went on to speculate that after legal fees, Russell and Stracick likely walked away
with $2-$3 million each.
After an eight-year ordeal, the two had gone from being awarded what was one of the largest
legal payouts from Disney in the company’s history, to what would likely amount to pocket
change for Disney.
But for Russell and Stracick, it seemed like a choice between $240 million they might never
see or a few million that they would actually walk away with.
Meanwhile, whether or not they did use ideas from Sports Island, Disney still owns and
operates the ESPN Wide World of Sports.
It kind of makes you wonder, jury verdict aside, who actually won here?