Couldn't I just do this myself with AI?
We get asked this more than almost anything else. Someone finds out there's surplus money sitting at a courthouse with their name on it, and the first instinct is a reasonable one: if the record is public, and there's a chatbot that can write a legal-sounding motion in ten seconds, why hand a stranger a cut?
It's a fair question, and it deserves a straight answer instead of a sales pitch. So here's the honest version, including the parts where AI genuinely helps and the parts where we've watched it quietly cost people the very money they were trying to recover.
You can do this yourself. Whether you should lean on AI to do it is a different question.
Where AI actually earns its keep
Start with the good news, because it's real. AI is genuinely useful for the parts of this that don't carry any risk. Understanding what a surplus even is. Getting the rough shape of how a claim moves through the court. Turning a page of confusing legalese into plain English so you know what you're looking at. Drafting a first version of a note to the clerk.
If that's what you want it for, use it. We'd honestly rather talk to someone who walked in informed than someone who's lost. A claimant who understands their own case asks better questions and makes better decisions.
The trouble starts the moment the stakes turn real, when a document has to be exactly right, filed in exactly the right place, by exactly the right person, before a deadline that doesn't move.
The thing AI can't see: your actual case
A chatbot doesn't have your file. It can't open the Butler County docket, read the confirmation-of-sale entry, or tell you that a junior lienholder filed a motion against your surplus three weeks ago. It works from patterns in text, not from your case. When it hits a gap, it fills it with whatever sounds most plausible.
In everyday life, plausible-and-wrong is harmless. In a courthouse it's expensive. We've had people show us AI-written motions that cited a statute from another state, or assumed the money was still with the clerk when it had already been turned over to the county treasurer, or quietly ignored a competing claim the writer never knew existed. Every one of those is a rejection waiting to happen, and the person filing it usually has no idea until the notice comes back.
There's a quieter cost too. To get a useful answer, people paste their name, their address, their case, sometimes their family's details into a tool they don't control. That information doesn't need to be floating around to claim money that's already yours.
The mistakes we see (and yes, we see them a lot)
We've changed the details below so no one is identifiable, but the patterns are ones we run into over and over.
The beautiful motion that got tossed. One prospective claimant in southwest Ohio used a chatbot to write his distribution motion and filed it himself. It read cleanly. It also named the wrong fund and never accounted for a lien sitting ahead of him. The court rejected it. By the time he came to us he'd lost four months, and in the meantime another creditor had moved into line for a piece of the same money. What looked free cost him both time and position.
The heir who was told it was simple. Another person was trying to claim her late father's surplus. She asked an AI how to prove she was the rightful heir, and it told her, confidently, to send a death certificate and a short letter. That isn't how Ohio handles it. The county needed an estate opened in probate and formal letters of authority before anyone could touch the funds. Her filing sat rejected for weeks while she tried to figure out what went wrong, and the clock never stopped.
The deadline that almost closed. A third claimant relied on an AI's cheerful assurance that he had "years" to file. He did have a window. It just wasn't the one the bot described, and his county had printed a not-available-after date that the tool never mentioned and couldn't have known. He came within a few weeks of the entire surplus being forfeited to the county, permanently, before a real person caught it.
None of these people were careless. They were doing exactly what a smart, busy person does: reaching for a tool that felt capable and free. The tool just wasn't built to know what it didn't know.
The parts no software can do for you
Set the drafting aside for a second, because drafting was never the hard part. Someone has to file the motion in the right court under the right case number, serve the correct parties the right way, and then respond when a magistrate asks a question or sets a hearing. When the owner has died, someone has to actually open probate and prove heirship. When a lien is circling the surplus, someone has to deal with it before it eats your share. And when the day comes, someone has to show up.
AI can't stand in front of a judge. It can't be served, can't be sworn, and can't be held responsible when it's wrong. You can. That's the quiet asymmetry at the center of all of this: the software makes the confident claim, and you absorb the consequence.
The math almost everyone gets wrong
Doing it yourself with AI feels like the free option, and that's exactly why the real cost hides. Add up one rejected filing, the refiling fees, a few months of delay, a lien that slipped through unnoticed, and the genuine possibility of missing the deadline outright, and "free" can quietly become the whole surplus.
Here's the part that catches people off guard: the bigger your claim, the worse a DIY misstep tends to hurt. Larger surpluses pull competing interests out of the woodwork, and a small procedural mistake in a small case becomes a very costly one in a large case. The more there is to win, the less it makes sense to hand the filing to something that can't be held accountable for getting it wrong.
The way we think about it
We're not anti-AI. We use it ourselves for the parts it's good at, and we think you should too. Read up. Ask it to explain the process. Have it help you understand a letter before you sign anything, including a letter from us.
Then, for the part that actually decides whether you keep your money, let a person who does this every week handle it. A licensed Ohio attorney reviews and files every claim we take on. We pull your real docket instead of a generic template, we find the liens and the heirship problems before they find you, and we don't ask for a dime up front, so if there's nothing there to recover, you owe nothing. Use AI to understand your situation. Let a human secure it.
Want us to check your property against the public record and show you exactly what's there, before you commit to anything? That's the whole point.
General information, not legal advice. Claims we handle are reviewed and filed by a licensed Ohio attorney.