A Philadelphia judge on Thursday kept Florida arbitration on hold in Alec Bohm’s lawsuit against his parents and let the fight over where the case belongs move forward in Pennsylvania. The ruling means the next stretch of the dispute will be about evidence and jurisdiction, not a quick transfer out of court.

Bohm filed the $3 million suit on March 25, accusing Daniel and Lisa Bohm of improperly managing his finances after taking charge of them early in his professional career. He says they used money tied to LLC accounts to pay his expenses, took sizeable amounts for personal use and said too little about the state of his finances. The filing also says his parents misrepresented their stakes in the LLCs.

The decision came at the first hearing in the case at City Hall in Philadelphia, where Judge Michael Erdos ordered that arbitration remain stayed in Florida while discovery proceeds in Pennsylvania. That gives both sides more than two months to collect evidence and issue subpoenas while they press the question of where the dispute should be heard.

At the center of the fight is a familiar split: Bohm wants the case in Pennsylvania, while his parents’ legal team is pushing for arbitration in Florida because the LLCs were organized there. Their filings also pointed to text messages between Bohm and his parents about stock purchases and bills paid by the LLCs, part of their effort to show the dispute belongs outside a Pennsylvania courtroom.

The money dispute added another layer in early April, when Bohm’s lawyers asked for a preliminary injunction to force back $528,618 that Daniel and Lisa had transferred from a brokerage account to help fund their legal expenses. Erdos did not grant that relief, and he said he does not think the money, held in a trust tied to the couple’s Florida lawyers, is going anywhere.

Bohm’s team has also argued that the transfer from Vanguard, which is headquartered in Malvern, Pa., helps establish jurisdiction here. Erdos initially thought that was enough to support Pennsylvania jurisdiction, but he later allowed jurisdictional discovery after Siobhan Cole said her documentation did not show a location for the transfer.

That leaves the case in an in-between stage: the parents are still seeking dismissal and Florida arbitration, Bohm is still pressing his Pennsylvania claim, and the court has not yet resolved either the jurisdiction fight or the fraud-related questions tied to the LLCs. For now, the next move belongs to the lawyers, who will spend the next two-plus months gathering records and trying to prove where this case should live.