Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection

From what I understand ownership of the Lego sets never left the Mansells. The consignment agreement states as much.

Even if we take what corporate says at face value (there was no agreement, or the agreement is null, or it's an agreement that the previous owners agreed to) that still just means that the store possesses property that they do not legally own. Whether or not they legally came to possess the sets seems irrelevant here.

I'm not a lawyer but I don't see how the Mansells ever stopped owning the lego sets.

The legal system is captured by legal professionals. The average American is bound by a system that they can't engage directly with. The middlemen who most people must hire to navigate through it generally will not help unless there's a substantial payday in it for them. And in civil matters, defendants have no right to representation.

(Also, the judge is colleagues with counsel, opposing or otherwise; none of them think much of you, which a trip to /r/LawyerTalk will confirm.)

All of this is a choice. Essentially the same choice that we have to have medical insurers instead of a single-payer system; a broken housing market controlled by large corporate interests, instead of one where prices are moderated by a stock of residences built by the government and sold at-cost or lower, as in Singapore or pre-Thatcher Great Britain; broken and spread-thin policing instead of the kind of sophisticated social support system that you would expect the richest country on the planet to be able to afford (and avoids sending the same armed ex-jock to domestic disturbances, mental health crises, car accidents, public school security, etc.). My suspicion is that the fight against change in any of these cases is so fierce because breaking one cartel threatens the others.

It's wild to me how willing people are to torch their company's reputation. If you've seen some of the videos and comments around this it really seems like the corporate owners, and possibly the new franchisee, are arguably, for lack of a better descriptio0n, egotistical bullies, the "yeah? sue me then" types. They've probably gone their entire life just being a-holes and not being held accountable. And now they're digging their heels in.

The facts and the law here are quite simple. Man consigns LEGO collection to the store. He has a contract. The new store owner still has that liability. The existence of a contract is in dispute. The franchisee's and corporate owner's positions seems to be that the contract is with the previous owner not the owner's store.

Well, if that's true, the LEGO collection still belongs to that previous owner and the new owner has simply stolen it. So their legal argument is ridiculous.

Allegedly that previous owner was basically kicked out of the store and denied the opportunity to take inventory so that owner probably has a case against corporate and the new owners as well.

There is no world in which this ends well for the company of the new store owner. And it's wild to me that they're sticking to their guns here. Beyond the legal issues, the reputational damage is massive. These stores are for LEGO collectors and they're screaming bloody murder. Plus ordinary people who hear about this story have an innate sense of fairness so immediately side with the people who've had their $200k LEGO collection effectively stolen.

Plus this now has so much publicity that there are any number of lawyers who will take on this case just for the publicity.

It's also funny that the Utah police who got involved when people went to corporate are basically just acting like corporate's security arm.

All of these quotes are false and directly contradicted by publicly available statements made by the CEO + Corporate.