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Alright, lets talk about the LEGOs.
In case you have been living under a rock, here's the story so far:
Elderly man has $200,000 LEGO Star Wars collection.
Elderly man enters into a consignment agreement with the local Bricks and Minifigs franchise.
Said franchise undergoes a messy ownership change mediated by Bricks and Minifigs corporate. The new owners stop honoring the previous consignment agreement and refuse to give the LEGOs back.
Elderly man's son gets the runaround trying to get his father's LEGOs back. Corporate tells him to deal with the franchise owner. The franchise tells him to deal with corporate.
Frustrated, the elderly man's son turns to YouTuber Reckless Ben. The resulting video goes viral.
The situation escalates into a wild goose chase as Reckless Ben attempts to serve legal process onto the store owners, aggravated by encounters with the suspiciously hostile American Fork, Utah police department (oh yeah, both the new franchise owners and the Bricks and Minifigs CEO are Mormon)
All of this is complicated by the fact that Reckless Ben is, well, reckless. He wears hidden spy cameras. He uses false pretenses to get into situations and locations. At one point he gets arrested for stalking. Despite this, it's hard not to root for him. He seems to have the franchise owners dead to rights for conversion (aka stealing), and Bricks and Minifigs corporate seems at best lackadasical that one of their franchises is defrauding counterparties, and at worst complicit.
I don't see how Bricks and Minifigs survives this as a company. This story is everywhere and nobody is on their side. This is not a particularly lucrative buisiness to begin with, and right now their name is mud. They did, finally, two weeks later, sort of admit that they were wrong and that Brian will get his LEGOs back. It's been radio silence from the principles since that last message went out. I would be surprised if we've heard the end of this saga.
It just seems like they should have started a lawsuit and it's really suspicious that they didn't just start a lawsuit. They went down a lot of wacky schemes to avoid doing so and I have no earthly idea why the ceo bothered talking to them at all. Seemed like no one involved had any idea what they were supposed to do, probably because even if you dot your is and cross you ts people won't take you seriously if you're some obnoxious youtube personality doing skits interspersed with your legal challenges. The cops seemed to really fuck up at multiple points though.
The law is on the store's side, as I described below. They only have a valid lawsuit against the original storeowner, if he hasn't actually declared bankruptcy, and he's likely insolvent even if he hasn't. The law allows a consignors goods to be lawfully taken by the lender/repossessor in this case. So extralegal measures are all he has.
Having looked at the case further since posting and seen what legal commentators are saying, they all seem to believe that the UCC filing requirement wouldn't apply in this case. The purpose of the filing requirement is to protect creditors from finding out after a default that the property in which they have a security interest isn't actually owned by the debtor. Hence the requirement that the debtor business not be known to its creditors as typically selling consigned merchandise. It would be difficult to argue that a store dealing primarily in used and resale items wouldn't fall into this category, especially when the creditor in question executed a franchise agreement that explicitly contemplates consignments. Furthermore, courts have proposed a cutoff of 20% of inventory value, and the value of the consigned product in this case was allegedly 50% of total inventory value. There's also the possible consumer goods exception, though this is a weaker argument because the Legos in question were in sealed boxes that had arguably been held for resale and not purchased with the intention of using them for normal consumer purposes.
Honestly it's an outdated rule that should be nixed entirely, since no banks are extending credit based on a visual inspection of the store's inventory. At the very least, they're looking at the average running value of inventory on the books, which would exclude anything held on consignment. But I don't think BAM has a credible argument that they had no idea that the store might accept goods on consignment, which would defeat any argument over a UCC filing. I also don't have much sympathy for Mansell for not making such a filing. I understand the argument that Joe Consumer isn't going to be sophisticated enough to make a UCC filing, but Joe Consumer doesn't generally consign $200,000 worth of goods. I know lawyers have a reputation for saying "should have talked to an attorney" in situations when no normal person would, but I don't think I'm out of line to suggest that when you're entering a complicated transaction that involves entrusting property worth as much as a house to a stranger, it might be worth spending a couple hundred bucks to make sure you don't get taken advantage of.
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