Portland startup Think Brilliant sues The Office's Rainn Wilson

Rainn Wilson partners with a web design firm to develop SoulPancake in exchange for monthly payments and the verbal promise of equity at some later point. Two years pass. Monthly payments were made, but in the end negotiations fall through while negotiating equity agreement and Rainn kills the development service relationship. So no more work and no more monthly payments. Things get nasty, and Rainn sends a nastygram to the staff at Think Brilliant accusing them of fraud.

The "hacking" end of the complaint makes little sense, with proprietary source code being extracted from a "database". Trying to parse the wording, it sounds like they downloaded stuff they shouldn't have while trying to migrate the site from Think Brilliant servers. The "database" may be referring to an SVN repository.

I wouldn't have thought you could make a stand in court on a verbal agreement. I'm curious as to how the Quantum Meruit claim will pan out given a history of compensated work, and how promises of equity fit in.