CCBN SAYS THOMSON FINANCIAL STOLE
CONFIDENTIAL BOARD INFORMATION TO COMPETE

Lawsuit Accuses Breach of Fiduciary Duty; CCBN's Chairman Calls Thomson's Actions 'An Egregious Disregard of Business Ethics'

BOSTON, MA, July 30, 2002 - CCBN.com, Inc. ("CCBN"), the global leader in Internet-based investor communications, today charged that Thomson Corporation (NYSE: TOC) (TSX: TOC) and its Thomson Financial Inc. subsidiary breached its fiduciary duty by using confidential information from CCBN board meetings to compete against the firm.

In a lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, CCBN also charged that Thomson has consistently engaged in unfair trade and business practices; misrepresentation; breach of contract; and monopolization in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.

"For more than four years, Thomson Financial, through its designees to CCBN's Board of Directors, received the most sensitive business information about our company and then used everything it learned - and more that it stole by breaking into password-protected sites - to create a directly competitive business," said Jeffrey P. Parker, chairman and CEO of CCBN. "It is a disgraceful breach of good faith by this family-controlled company and an egregious disregard for the most basic business ethics."

"How can Thomson representatives ever expect to sit on any Board of Directors again if they can't understand the basic responsibility of representing a company's shareholders?" he added.

Thomson Financial, the largest outside shareholder in CCBN, owning approximately 10 percent of the company, invested in CCBN when it was founded in 1997. At the time, Thomson insisted upon, and received, two seats on CCBN's Board of Directors. Thomson Financial continued to be represented on the Board until April 2002.

The suit says Thomson Financial, having induced CCBN into a relationship of "trust and confidence, …improperly used information obtained in their roles as fiduciaries [of CCBN], misappropriated CCBN corporate opportunities and improperly used their dominant market power to injure and steal [CCBN's] business."

Background
CCBN offers a broad range of Web-based investor relations products and services to publicly-traded companies and the investment community, including the StreetEvents service (a calendar of companies' investor relations activities), the creation and maintenance of corporate IR internet Web pages, and the "webcasting" of corporate IR events, such as earnings calls. Thomson Financial's focus, on the other hand, has traditionally been on the dissemination of information among the investing community (investors, analysts and investment bankers), primarily through its "First Call" service, which provides investment research and earnings estimates for thousands of public companies.

CCBN was founded by Parker and Robert Adler. Parker, a former Chairman and CEO of Thomson Financial, developed First Call and sold it to Thomson Financial in 1986. Parker, who left Thomson Financial in 1991, invited his former employer to be an investor and strategic partner in CCBN not long after it was founded in February 1997.

Specific Charges
Despite assurances that Thomson Financial "had no plans to offer IR communication services to corporations," CCBN says that beginning in early 2000, Thomson Financial began to systematically use its position on the Board "to delay CCBN from pursuing its own plans and to delay CCBN's recognition that Thomson Financial would soon be competing with CCBN in the provision of services to CCBN's core IR market."

The lawsuit provides several examples of how Thomson Financial's actions - as a Board member and fiduciary of CCBN - acted in a manner that was inimical to CCBN's interests:

• In early 2000, according to the complaint, CCBN revealed a new "intelligence dashboard" that would have expanded the financial information and services available to investor relations professionals, including investor attitudes, trading volume, shareholder targeting data, and institutional holdings. Thomson Financial requested that CCBN not use any other companies' data, even if superior, or any aggregate information that might undercut Thomson Financial's offerings to the investor community. Unaware of Thomson's true motivation, CCBN concurred and scrapped the intelligence dashboard, thereby relinquishing an innovative way to interact with its customers.
• The suit further references a November 2000 board meeting in which CCBN management outlined its view of the company's European opportunities, including a plan to joint venture with one of two European companies it identified. The Thomson Financial Board member told CCBN not to move forward because Thomson Financial itself might want to be the joint venture partner. Despite discussions in both London and the US, including the presentation of detailed financial projections, "CCBN never received a response from Thomson Financial. CCBN did nothing to pursue its strategy, constrained by the admonitions of the Thomson Financial director."
• In fact, the suit continues, that a broad range of discussions on different ways to collaborate were held throughout 2000 and early 2001. During that period, "Thomson Financial did not follow up on any of the plans that CCBN discussed with them in 2000; nor did Thomson Financial propose any of its own plans for cooperation." Instead, Thomson Financial "used the promise of further collaboration and the associate meetings as a device to delay CCBN from pursuing its own plans..."
• In December 2000, NASDAQ sent out a confidential request for proposal to a limited number of vendors, including CCBN but not Thomson Financial, to provide webcasting and other communications services. Within two months, CCBN emerged as the leading candidate to provide such services and a meeting was scheduled in March to negotiate terms - information CCBN provided to its Board. At the March meeting, NASDAQ informed CCBN that their contract was delayed due to "a last minute entry" - Thomson Financial, which had used the information from CCBN's Board Meeting and its position as a major data supplier to NASDAQ to win the right to pitch the business. This despite Thomson Financial's inability to deliver the necessary services at the time. Ultimately, no supplier was engaged.

Hiring Former Employees

• In July 2001 CCBN management told the Board, including the Thomson-appointed director, that it planned to acquire ccall.com Inc, the operator of the StreetFusion event calendar, a smaller competitor in the IR field. The CCBN plan called for the purchase of assets of ccall.com but not staff, although the latter would be required to maintain confidentiality about ccall.com and StreetFusion's proprietary information.

"Almost as soon as CCBN bought ccall.com, and without any request of or disclosure to CCBN, in violation of its fiduciary duties to CCBN, Thomson Financial hired numerous ccall.com/StreetFusion employees to develop for Thomson Financial an IR calendar to compete directly against CCBN with the use of the information they had acquired while employed at ccall.com."

• In July 2001, Thomson again breached its fiduciary duty to present opportunities to CCBN by purchasing 20 percent of Wall Street Source (WSS), a CCBN competitor offering market information, IR calendar, and other IR products and services. Thomson later acquired Earnings.com, a small company in the calendar space that CCBN had been in discussions with. Earnings.com, the suit charges, is now a key component in Thomson entry into CCBN's space.

Thomson, the suit says, disclosed to CCBN neither the ccall.com employee hirings, the Wall Street Source investment, nor the Earnings.com purchase.

• This past April, Thomson Financial announced it would partner with two other firms that compete with CCBN - Fair Disclosure Financial Network ("FDFN") and CCN, LLC ("CCN") - to provide conference call summaries and transcripts as part of the product line that competes directly against StreetEvents. Thompson's offering, "First Call Events," contains elements of WSS, Earnings.com, StreetFusion, FDFN, and CCN and is "identical" to StreetEvents, the suit says.

Pricing on First Call Events is designed to further harm CCBN. For non-First Call customers, Thomson's pricing is identical to CCBN's, while existing and new First Call customers receive First Call Events - the product that competes with CCBN - free.

Relationship with PR Newswire

• Most recently, the suit charges, Thomson rolled out its strategic relationship with PR Newswire, a leading news release service for corporations. Thomson Financial and PR Newswire are offering new services including Web site hosting and webcasting. Thomson Financial was aware that CCBN viewed PR Newswire as its primary competitor due to its size, client base and the duopoly in the press release distribution business. If PR Newswire was open to an alliance, Thomson Financial's responsibility was to present that opportunity to CCBN.
• CCBN notes that Thomson Financial's tying access to its Earning Estimates Services (in which they have a 90% market share) to its own online investor relations services is anticompetitive as well as a disservice to customers who are forced to accept an inferior product line. "At least one CCBN customer has advised CCBN that Thomson Financial's bundling of services, coupled with its dominance in many important financial information service markets prevents its customers from shopping for the best services and leaves them without any choice but to accept First Call Events."
• In fact, the lawsuit notes, Thomson Financial employees have breached their contract with CCBN by accessing the StreetEvents application and copying information that was later used to create, maintain and run First Call Events.

"From day one, we viewed Thomson Financial as our partner," Adler said. "We shared our proprietary financial data and marketing information with them. We suggested ways of working together. Instead of embracing the relationship and maximizing its potential for our mutual benefit, they acted deceptively and unethically. At a time when corporate ethics is receiving paramount attention, Thomson has demonstrated that its corporate values lean more toward greed and deceit. And at a time when SEC promulgations, such as Regulation FD, are seeking greater disclosure, Thomson is pursuing a strategy that allows them to limit and control how information is disseminated."

Relief Sought
CCBN is asking the Court to order Thomson to:

• Return to CCBN all proprietary material.
• Stop competing with CCBN using information, know-how, or strategies acquired from CCBN in confidence or in a fiduciary capacity.
• Cease logging onto CCBN Web sites without proper authorization and under false pretenses.
• Award compensatory and treble damages, as well as any other relief the Court considers appropriate.

The complaint can be found at www.ccbn.com/complaint.

About CCBN
Co-founded in 1997 by Jeffrey P. Parker, creator of First Call, and Robert Adler, CCBN is the global leader in enabling direct communications between public companies and the investment community over the Internet. CCBN builds, manages and hosts the investor relations sections of Web sites for more than 2,500 public companies, providing detailed shareholder information through interactive, multimedia solutions. In addition, CCBN hosts live and archived quarterly conference calls for more than 3,000 corporations each quarter. Through the CCBN StreetEvents institutional event management database (www.streetevents.com) and partnerships with leading retail financial portals, CCBN has created a revolutionary investor distribution network that delivers an unprecedented body of direct corporate information to the largest collective audience of institutional and individual investors online. Headquartered in Boston, MA, CCBN has additional offices in San Francisco and London. For more information, visit www.ccbn.com or call 866-228-CCBN (2226).

Contacts:
CCBN
Greg Radner
(617) 603-7784
gradner@ccbn.com