A team of court-appointed attorneys has spent the past year investigating, safeguarding and liquidating disgraced former lawyer Alex Murdaugh’s assets to raise nearly $1.3 million — so far — for his alleged victims and creditors.
Now, they want to get paid themselves.
At a Dec. 1 hearing in York County, the team, led by Columbia trial lawyer John Lay and former U.S. Attorney for South Carolina Peter McCoy, will request more than $374,000 in fees for their work.
That money would come out of the fund they have generated to compensate the crowd of plaintiffs Murdaugh, a once-respected Hampton attorney, allegedly wronged during a decadelong blitz of fraud, theft and betrayal. Though substantial, it won't come close to covering the millions Murdaugh is accused of plundering from the people around him.
Lay and McCoy, known as the Murdaugh “receivers,” contend they have more than earned their proposed 30 percent fee, having spent nearly 2,200 hours on the case since their appointment in November 2021.
They point to their work issuing nearly 70 subpoenas to law firms, banks, attorneys and other individuals and then reviewing the thousands of financial records they received in response.
They say they put a stop to efforts by Murdaugh and his associates to shift the 54-year-old’s assets to relatives and preferred creditors. And they tout their negotiations with Murdaugh’s lawyers, business partners and banks to resolve complicated legal disputes over what remains of his properties and wealth.
Their $1.3 million settlement fund, which still could grow, includes money from the following sources:
- About $300,000 from the liquidation of Murdaugh’s $1.7 million retirement plan. After taxes and early withdrawal penalties, nearly $900,000 remained. Roughly $600,000 of that was allocated to pay for Murdaugh’s criminal legal defense.
- Nearly $360,000 from the July sale of the Edisto Beach house that Alex and Maggie Murdaugh jointly owned. The house went for $955,000 but a good chunk of that money was needed to satisfy the mortgage, an outstanding lien and real estate fees.
- Nearly $515,000 from the sale of 146 acres of property in Berkeley County in which Murdaugh had an ownership stake.
- About $100,000 from the sale of the largest of seven islands Murdaugh owned in and around Beaufort County.
- Some $17,000 from the just-approved sale of timber on land owned by Murdaugh and his brothers.
“But for our involvement, very little of this money would be available for creditors to access,” Lay told The Post and Courier.
The fund could still grow from other 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. The Murdaugh receivers are in a legal dispute with John Marvin Murdaugh, Alex’s younger brother and the manager of Maggie’s estate, over how the proceeds of that sale should be distributed.
The fee request from Lay and McCoy comes 17 months after the slayings of Murdaugh’s wife and son jump-started the since-disbarred attorney’s personal unraveling. Murdaugh himself has since been charged with their murders, among some 90 criminal counts filed against him over the past year.
Circuit Judge Daniel Hall placed Lay and McCoy in charge of Murdaugh’s finances amid concerns the disbarred attorney and his allies were trying to shield his once-considerable fortune from recovery in civil litigation against him.
Roughly a dozen lawsuits have been filed against Murdaugh in recent years. Some allege he shares responsibility for a fatal 2019 boat crash in which his late son, Paul, was reportedly driving drunk. Others accuse him of surreptitiously stealing millions of dollars from his legal clients, law partners and others who trusted him.
Those claims are collectively worth far more than what’s left of Murdaugh’s fortune, meaning Murdaugh — the son of a line of prosecutors in South Carolina’s Lowcountry — likely faces bankruptcy in addition to decades of prison time.
Eric Bland, a Columbia trial attorney who represents several Murdaugh plaintiffs, praised Lay and McCoy’s work while acknowledging the money they have recovered won’t come close to satisfying the legal claims against Murdaugh.
“They have been tenacious,” Bland said. “We never fully expected they would recover enough property that there would be dollar-for-dollar recovery for victims.”
That means a judge will eventually have to decide how to split the receivers' $1.3 million settlement fund among Murdaugh’s alleged victims and creditors.
John Marvin Murdaugh said the receivers’ request for fees seems steep. He said that money should go to his brother’s victims, not to more lawyers.
The Murdaugh receivers have said they are working at a reduced hourly rate. At their normal fare, they would have already racked up some $700,000 in fees, they attested in court filings.
Judge Hall will have the ultimate say on how much they get.
