All means all – Indiana supreme court

From  Wohlt v. Wohlt, No. 4S-DR-385 (Ind. Nov. 21, 2024):

While they were married, Christi Wohlt and August Wohlt owned a company called Echo Systems, Inc., which mined, traded, and stored cryptocurrencies. When they dissolved their marriage, they agreed in their property settlement that “Husband shall retain all assets of the business, except for . . . Wife’s Mac computer and printer, iPhone, iPad and laptop,” which she would retain.

But they both forgot that Echo Systems still owned some cryptocurrencies, and the question we must answer is whether that oversight makes their agreement ambiguous as to who should own them.

As we explain below, we hold there is no ambiguity, and the parties’ agreement that August would retain “all” of the company’s assets included the company’s cryptocurrencies.

While parties sometimes agree in their property settlements to make later adjustments for forgotten assets, the parties here instead made clear that their agreement divided all their assets—forgotten and remembered—so that their division would be final.

And while a party who remembers a forgotten asset after a dissolution decree may sometimes have a remedy through claims like mutual mistake or fraud, this appeal doesn’t present those claims.

(Cleaned up, extra paragraphing added.)

I’m using this as the basis for a definition of all in the next version of my course materials (with a cite to the Wohlt opinion):

All: In case of doubt: When the term “all” is used in respect of a specified set of things, it means all such things — regardless whether the parties did not know, and/or forgot, and/or could not have known, that certain things were part of the set — other than in cases of mutual mistake or fraud when those doctrines are pleaded and proved as provided by law. [238]

And a footnote:

[238] A hypothetical example: Spouses Chris and Tracy get divorced. They jointly own a business. • In the spouses’ agreed final divorce decree, Chris becomes the sole owner of certain assets of their business, and Tracy the sole owner of “all” other assets of the business. • The spouses, though, forgot that their business also owned certain cryptocurrency assets; later Chris claims part-ownership of those assets, but does not assert mutual mistake or fraud. • On these facts, Chris loses.