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Powerball: Do's & don'ts of office lottery pools

Posted at 5:45 PM, Jan 08, 2016
and last updated 2016-01-08 17:45:58-05

The pressure to join an office lottery pool is real.

No one wants to be the one person left behind.

“I never play the lottery, but with a $700 million jackpot, I was like, well I’ll join that,” said Jordan Rivera.

Right now recruiters at Cell Staff are daydreaming of becoming multi-millionaires.

“I'm feeling very lucky,” said Grant Hargis.

Ten of them put $20 each into the office pool.

“I was really impressed with how high it was getting,” said Rivera.

But with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, if you hit the jackpot, confusion, lack of clarity and greed can come into play.

So attorney Jeff Swartz says be sure to name someone who will be in charge of the tickets and have a verbal or written agreement.

“The written contract can simply say everyone who is signing the document agrees to share the proceeds from the drawing that's going to take place on Saturday,” said Swartz.

Each person also needs to have a copy of the ticket to avoid the “I bought the winning ticket on my own” excuse.

If you want to be completely safe, don’t enter in an office pool at all; buy your own ticket, you win it, you don’t share it.

But you can’t stop these co-workers from trying to increase their odds, even if trust is a factor.

"We have a signed contract,” said Vanessa Herrera.

For now, it’s back to thinking about what they would do with all that money.

“I'll probably go to Vegas have a little fun first, then figure it out from there,” said Dan Gutierrez.

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