Bricks & Minifigs #lawyer #law #court #attorney #personalinjurylawyer

A family consigned their LEGO collection worth around $200,000 to a bricks and mini-fig store. Consignment means that the store sells your stuff for you, but you still own it until they sell it. Then store ownership changed hands, and the new owners and their corporate brand took the position that the consignment was never authorized, that the old operators weren't even allowed to make a deal. So, as far as they're concerned, it's not their contract to honor. The family's responses, there's a signed contract, the collection was always ours, give it back! Now people on mine are furious. At the police. To them, it's obvious, those LEGOs have been stolen. That's a crime, so why are the cops plowing this "civil" and saying there's nothing they can do? You may have heard these words, and too often, it just means that the cops are "coping out". Now this LEGO case is genuinely messy, there's a real fight over whose contract even counts. So maybe a court really is the right place for it, but the outrage is pointing at something that is real, because too often police just default to, it's just a civil matter and then head out. Let's imagine a contractor takes your $10,000 deposit, does zero work and vanishes, is that civil? Someone borrows your car and they keep it. Civil? A lot of time police will tell you so, but they are flat wrong. Taking someone's property, knowing it isn't yours, that's called theft, and the line between a civil dispute and a crime really comes down to one thing, and that's intent in figuring that out, whether there is this intent, requires police work, like looking at documents, conducting interviews, deciding who's telling the truth. So if a police officer ever waves you off and says, "Look, that's civil!" Ask them how they know, Because a lot of the time they're not sure and they're just making it up.