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: The Once and Future Lawyer

Money found in walls and the legal battle that ensued

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This article was all over the news yesterday and merits a brief discussion, if only for the humor of it. See Finding Cash in Walls, and Reaping Grief.

A contractor found $182,000 hidden in a wall of a house he was working on. Since that's a lot of money to hide from the government, he decided to do the right thing and tell the owner, with the expectation of getting the equivalent of a "finders keepers, losers weepers" fee.

The question becomes how do you split the value of this treasure trove? Well, like kids on a playground, they couldn't agree. Without knowing how this particular law works in Ohio, I read on with curiosity as to what happened next: the family of the original owner of the money found out about it, decided the upside of suing was worth more than the downside, and will wind up with a certain part of it.

Now, this is good for the descendants of said money hording original owner of the $182,000, but bad for the finder and the current owner. Because they could not agree on a number between 10 and 40 percent (owner offered 10, contractor wanted 40), they decided to get the law involved, tipped the press off to garner sympathy, and the family of the original person who hid the money decided that this money was really theirs. And the real winner of all of this? The lawyers.

Here's some free common sense advice: It will be much cheaper if you can figure out how to divvy up the money between the two finders. Granted, the contractor probably should have gotten not much more than 10 or 15 percent, but that could have easily been negotiated out. I think the article alludes to the fact he wound up with 13 percent or so. Either way, 10 or 15 percent of 200,000 is much more than the pittance they probably wound up with after fees and fighting this out in court since December 2007.

I also saw an interesting article about how the internet generation (or "Google generation," if you will) makes for a lousy jury, but haven't read it yet. It's about English law, so I'm not sure how well that translates over.