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Everyone In This LEGO Dispute Should Have Spoken To A Lawyer Earlier Than They Did

Legal Issues

from the bricks-and-minifigs-and-influencers-and-lawsuits dept

Tue, Jun 2nd 2026 01:26pm -

Mike Masnick

On Techdirt, we often complain about lawyers and bad lawyering and bad cases. But there are times when lawyers are helpful, and my one-sentence summary after spending many days trying to understand a viral dispute about [checks notes] some old Star Wars LEGO sets is that a lot of people should have spoken to competent lawyers before doing… whatever the fuck they decided to do here.

If you haven’t been following the Bricks & Minifigs saga, congratulations on your peaceful existence. It’s a genuinely difficult story to track, partly because you have to watch a bunch of long YouTube videos to piece it together, and partly because almost everyone covering it is pushing a specific angle. Just as a point of reference, Bricks & Minifigs is a company that franchises its concept of stores for buying and selling lego blocks and sets — and, yes, minifigs. They have about 300 stores, most of which are franchised.

The basic summary (and some of this is disputed) is that a local Bricks & Minifigs franchise in Keizer, Oregon made an agreement with a guy named Bryan Mansell to sell a very large collection that his father had put together over many years of collectable unopened Star Wars LEGO sets. The intention of the collection had (we are told) always been to pay for college for Bryan’s children. His father, an 83-year-old man, had agreed to have Bryan sell the sets via the Keizer store on consignment. The collection was advertised, including on the store’s Instagram page where they made it clear that it was "one of the largest, most valuable privately held collections of Star Wars LEGO in the world" and that it was about to go on sale.

Later photos in that post detailed that they believed the collection was "worth well over $200,000" and that the entire collection would be sold through the store. The actual value of the legos in question is disputed, but the lowest number I’ve seen is closer to $60k. The entirety of the Instagram post text reads:

Saturday and Sunday, the 11th and 12th of November, the Bricks and Minifigs store in Salem-Kaiser will display one of the largest, most valuable privately held collections of Star WarsTM LEGO in the world. The event will be open to journalists and the public for photos before the collection goes on sale.

In the early 90s, Ed Mansell predicted Star WarsTM LEGO would be a good investment. Over the next 15 years, he purchased approximately $20,000 of Star WarsTM LEGO and preserved them, sealed, in their original boxes. The investment really paid off. The collection is now estimated to be worth well over $200,000. Multiple sets, including the highly prized, incredibly rare Cloud City set, are now worth more than $10,000 each. Some of the individual minifigs are worth more than $1,300 each. The ten-fold increase in the value of Mansell’s collection is a greater return than if Mansell had put the same amount of money into the stock market in a Dow Jones Index Fund.

When Ed Mansell decided it was time to divest, he turned to his son, Bryan Mansell. Bryan knows more about his father’s comic book and baseball card collection but didn’t feel confident in his knowledge of the LEGO secondary market. He saw the sign for the Bricks and Minifigs store while passing by on North River Road, came in, and asked the store owner, Chrystal Law, if she could help. "I told him, even if we couldn’t sell the collection, I would help him figure out how much it was worth because I didn’t want him to get ripped off. And I think that’s why he trusted me," Law said. The entire collection will be sold through Law’s store, but first they wanted to put it all on display so the public can see it in its entirety.

The collection will be on display in the store’s party room from 10am till 6pm on Saturday, November 11th, and 11am till 6pm on Sunday. The collection will be available for sale immediately, so the best time for pictures will be Saturday morning. The collection will not be stored on-site after hours for security reasons, and after Sunday the sets will be available for purchase but stored elsewhere. Bricks and Minifigs is located at 3670 River Road in Kaiser.

Apparently, over the course of 2024, various parts of the collection were sold off and Mansell would stop by each month to collect his cut of the sales. There is a dispute over how much of the collection was actually sold before everything went off the rails in...