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A group of court-appointed lawyers have spent the past 12 months investigating, protecting and liquidating former lawyer Alex Murdaugh's assets to raise nearly US$1.3 million – to date – for his alleged victims and creditors.
Now, they want to get paid.
At a Dec. 1 hearing in York County, the team, led by Columbia attorney John Lay and former South Carolina prosecutor Peter McCoy, will request more than US$374,000 in expenses for their work.
Those funds would come out of the fund they generated to compensate the group of plaintiffs Murdaugh, an already respected Hampton lawyer allegedly wronged over a decade-long blitz of fraud, theft and treason. While tremendous, it may not come close to protecting the thousands upon thousands Murdaugh is accused of plundering from the people around him.
Lay and McCoy, regulars as Murdaugh's “receivers,” claim they have more than earned the proposed 30% payout, having spent nearly 2,200 hours on the case since their appointment in November 2021.
They go about their business by issuing nearly 70 subpoenas to law firms, banks, lawyers and others and then reviewing the many tax statistics they obtained in response.
They are saying they have stopped efforts by Murdaugh and his friends to transfer the 54-year-old's belongings to his wife, children and favored creditors. And they advance their negotiations with Murdaugh's lawyers, business partners and banks to untangle complicated criminal disputes over what remains of their homes and wealth.
Its liquidation fund of US$1.3 million, which may still grow, includes funds from the following sources:
- About $300,000 of Murdaugh's $1.7 million retirement plan settlement. After taxes and penalties for early withdrawal, almost $ 900,000 remained. Approximately $600,000 of this went to pay for Murdaugh's criminal defense in prison.
- basically $360,000 from the July sale of the Edisto beachfront condominium that Alex and Maggie Murdaugh jointly owned. The condominium cost $ 955,000, but a good portion of that money was needed to pay off the loan, a good guarantee and property prices.
- nearly $515,000 from the sale of 146 acres of property in Berkeley County, during which Murdaugh had an ownership interest.
- About $ 100,000 from the sale of the largest of the seven islands that Murdaugh owned in and around Beaufort County.
- About $ 17,000 from the newly approved sale of bushes on land owned by Murdaugh and his brothers.
“However, for our share, very little of that money is available for creditors to access,” Lay told The Post and Courier.
The fund could still grow from different sources, including the pending $$3.9 million sale of the Moselle estate in Colleton County, where Murdaugh's wife Maggie and son Paul were killed in June 2021. Fund recipients Murdaugh are in a prison dispute with John Marvin Murdaugh, Alex's younger brother and supervisor of Maggie's estate, over how the proceeds of this sale should still be distributed.
Lay and McCoy's fee request comes 17 months after the murders of Murdaugh's wife and son began the unraveling of the disbarred lawyer himself. Murdaugh himself considered having been charged with their murders, among some ninety criminal charges brought against him in the past 12 months.
Circuit Judge Daniel Hall put Lay and McCoy in charge of Murdaugh's budget amid issues the disbarred lawyer and his allies have tried to protect his once-considerable fortune from being cured in civil litigation against him.
About a dozen lawsuits have been filed against Murdaugh in recent years. Some allege he shares responsibility for a fatal 2019 boating accident in which his late son, Paul, was intoxicated. Others accuse him of surreptitiously stealing millions of dollars from his criminal customers, legislative partners and others who depended on him.
These claims cost far more than what's left of Murdaugh's fortune, meaning Murdaugh — the son of a family of prosecutors in South Carolina's Lowcountry — undoubtedly faces a chapter beyond a lengthy prison term.
Eric Bland, a Columbia attorney who represents several Murdaugh plaintiffs, praised the work of Lay and McCoy, while acknowledging that the funds they recovered will not come close to satisfying the criminal claims against Murdaugh.
“They’ve been tenacious,” Bland noted. “We never expected them to recover enough property for there to be dollar-for-dollar restoration for the victims.”
With this capacity, a judge will ultimately have to reach a decision on how to cut the US $ 1.3 million settlement fund from receivers between Murdaugh's alleged victims and creditors.
John Marvin Murdaugh noted that the receivers' cost request appears high. He said the funds can still go to his brother's victims, no longer to big lawyers.
Murdaugh recipients noted that they are working at a reduced hourly expense. At their average rate, they may have already racked up around US$$700,000 in expenses, court filings attest.
Judge Hall will have the ideal say on how much they receive.
