My favorite true lawyer story is about French law, where you can make a deal with an old person to pay their mortgage and house taxes and whatever monthly stipend you agree on, and own it after they die.
The lawyer and his family made such a deal with a (I think) 67 year old woman, but the woman kept living and the lawyer’s family was in too deep to quit, and especially since the longer it went on and stressed them, the older and more likely she was to die any minute.
The reason we got to see the story in the news. was because the woman did finally die after outliving everyone, she became France’s oldest person at the time of her death, and was 116 (or 115).
Boy my memory was terrible, but all I knew about the story was just a short newspaper article from many years ago, with her name from jonty30, I went to wikipedia, and it turns out that she died at 122, and is the longest living person with verified age.
“Both before and after Calment’s death, there have been several claims to have surpassed her age (see Incomplete longevity claims) but none of them has been proven and Calment therefore continues to hold the record for the oldest verified person ever.”
“In 1965, at age 90 and with no heirs, Calment signed a deal to sell her apartment to lawyer André-François Raffray, on a contingency contract. Raffray, then aged 47 years, agreed to pay her a monthly sum of 2,500 francs until she died. Raffray ended up paying Calment the equivalent of more than $180,000, which was more than double the apartment’s value. After Raffray’s death from cancer at the age of 77, in 1995, his widow continued the payments until Calment’s death.[2] During all these years, Calment used to say to them that she “competed with Methuselah”.”