The McNeff family

Chapter Four

#Pull the thread

A toy-store franchise fight was the entry point; behind it stands a family business that spent a quarter-century teaching clients how to make litigation and collection harder.

Everything to this point has been the surface. The toy store, the LEGO resale floors, the franchise that sells the right to buy and rebuild other people’s childhoods, all of it is real, and all of it is a distraction. Pull the thread and the franchise unspools into something older and stranger: a family, a doctrine, and a business model built on a single promise. The promise was that you could make yourself impossible to sue, and impossible to collect from.

The business was called Legally Mine. For most of its life it ran out of Orem, Utah, from an address it shared with a captive back-office company called LMRA Services, Inc. Utah UCC No. Utah UCC - LMRA Services Business 10165814 Detail Its product was an “asset protection plan”, that is the phrase a federal magistrate judge used, dryly, when a customer named Kasra Eliasieh sued the company in California over what he had bought. Eliasieh v. Legally Mine, LLC, No. 18-cv-03622-JSC, 2020 WL 1929244 (N.D. Cal. Apr. 21, 2020)^✓ What that plan actually was, and whether selling it was legal, would take years and another state to settle.

#The man at the center

The plan belonged to Daniel J. McNeff. He built Legally Mine and ran it, and around it he assembled a thicket of limited-liability companies that read, in retrospect, like a demonstration of his own curriculum. He came to the business of advising others about money with a securities-industry ban of his own: the NASD, the brokerage industry’s self-regulator, censured Daniel McNeff, fined him $15,000, and barred him from associating with any member firm in any capacity, in a decision that became final in January 1991, after he failed to answer the regulator’s questions about why a member firm had terminated him. FINRA BrokerCheck, Daniel J. McNeff (CRD No. 1193655) His registered securities career had run about six years, at a single small Georgia firm, and ended in that bar. Utah’s business registry ties Daniel McNeff personally to Legal Bear LLC Utah UCC No. Utah UCC - Legal Bear Business 8097970 Detail, to Procure LLC Utah UCC No. Utah UCC - Procure Business 10875462 Detail, to Team Dentistry LLC Utah UCC No. Utah UCC - Team Dentistry Business 13558625 Detail, to DDL Investments LLC Utah UCC No. Utah UCC - DDL Investments Business 12343181 Detail, and to Medisource Marketing LLC Utah UCC No. Utah UCC - Medisource Marketing Business 9224895 Detail, a row of innocuously named vehicles, each its own little fortress.

The fortress had a moat in Alaska, a state whose trust and charging-order statutes are friendly to people who do not want to be found by creditors. In November 2016 McNeff incorporated LMRA Services, Inc. as an Alaska corporation; the initial report listed him as the 100 percent owner and as director, president, secretary, treasurer, and shareholder all at once. Annual Report Utah LMRA Services INC Annual Report LMRA then became the registered agent, the official mailbox and front door, for a sprawl of further entities, the agent of record for thousands of companies across Alaska and Utah. One was Legal Elf, LLC, formed in 2017 with Daniel and Evelyn McNeff as fifty-fifty members and LMRA as its agent. Legal Elf, LLC - Initial Biennial Report (2017-10-12) As late as April 2026, with litigation closing in from several directions, a new Alaska company called Wize Grizzly, LLC was formed with Daniel McNeff as its 100 percent member and, again, LMRA as the registered agent. Wize Grizzly, LLC - Initial Biennial Report (2026-04-24) The same machinery produced layered structures for other clients, too, paired Alaska entities like Kerala House 101 and 102, one made the general partner of the other, the exact nesting-doll arrangement the strategy prescribes. Kerala House 101, LLC - Articles of Organization (2026-05-04)

This was not a sideline. It was the whole shape of the thing: a teacher who lived inside his own lesson.

#What the lesson cost

For roughly a quarter of a century, Legally Mine sold that lesson to clients, by its own account, on the order of twenty-one thousand of them, typically professionals with money to shield and a fear of being sued: doctors, dentists, small-business owners. The sales channel ran through trade conventions. According to the Ohio regulatory record, a dentist who attended a Legally Mine presentation at a dental convention in Canton, Ohio, enrolled in a premium package that promised an asset-protection blueprint and the legal-document work to build it. That enrollment is what eventually brought the whole enterprise before a state supreme court.

On November 10, 2023, the Ohio State Bar Association filed a complaint against Legally Mine and Daniel McNeff, charging that the company’s blueprint-and-document business was the unauthorized practice of law, drafting legal instruments and giving legal advice without a license. Ohio Bar v. Legally Mine The matter went not to a trial but to a consent resolution: the respondents waived notice and a hearing, and the Board on the Unauthorized Practice of Law issued a final report. Final Order, Ohio Bar v. Legally Mine

On February 20, 2025, the Supreme Court of Ohio adopted it. In a one-paragraph order that carries the full weight of the court, “Legally Mine, L.L.C., and Daniel McNeff” were “enjoined from engaging in the unauthorized practice of law in Ohio,” and a civil penalty was imposed. Ohio State Bar Assn. v. Legally Mine, L.L.C., 2025-Ohio-539, 177 Ohio St.3d 1441, 252 N.E.3d 155 (table)^✓ Final Order, Ohio Bar v. Legally Mine The penalty was $5,000, and the order required the company to notify affected clients and offer refunds. Final Order, Ohio Bar v. Legally Mine Daniel McNeff did not contest that he had directed the conduct; the resolution rests on the respondents’ own waiver and consent. Final Order, Ohio Bar v. Legally Mine It is worth being precise about what the order is and is not: a consent decree, limited to Ohio conduct, not a fully litigated finding of fraud. But on the narrow question the bar association posed, was this business the practice of law without a license, the highest court in Ohio said yes, and shut it down there.

Ohio was not the only place the model drew fire. Years earlier, the Eliasieh case in California had already put the “asset protection plan” before a federal court, where it ended up routed into private arbitration. Eliasieh v. Legally Mine, LLC, No. 18-cv-03622-JSC, 2020 WL 1929244 (N.D. Cal. Apr. 21, 2020)^✓ And in a Washington bankruptcy, a trustee challenged a Chapter 11 debtor’s $7,800 payment to Legally Mine for asset-protection services; according to the complaint the transfer was avoidable, and a judgment was ultimately entered against Legally Mine before being satisfied. Peterson v. Legally Mine The product, in other words, kept generating the very lawsuits it claimed to make irrelevant.

Set those findings beside each other and a pattern in the man himself emerges. In 1991 the securities regulators censured Daniel McNeff, fined him, and barred him from associating with any brokerage firm. FINRA BrokerCheck, Daniel J. McNeff (CRD No. 1193655) In 2025 the Supreme Court of Ohio enjoined him from the practice of law. Final Order, Ohio Bar v. Legally Mine In the years between and since, he built and ran a business whose entire promise was legal and financial protection. Two different regulators, decades apart, found him without the standing to do the very things his company sold.

#The sons, and the toys

Here is where the thread doubles back to the toy store. Daniel McNeff has two sons in the business, Ammon and Matthew, and the connective tissue between the asset-protection firm and the LEGO-resale franchise runs straight through them.

The franchise is operated by BAM Franchising, the company behind the Bricks & Minifigs brand. Its origins trace to an Oregon registration in 2011 BAM Franchising, Reg. No. 76881896, and when that Oregon registration was administratively dissolved and then reinstated in 2020, the reinstatement was signed by Matthew McNeff as secretary, with both Ammon and Matthew listed in officer roles. BAM Franchising, Reg. No. 76881896 A sister company, BAM IP Holdings LLC, was set up to hold the intellectual-property side, though the marks still name BAM Franchising and no transfer has surfaced; Utah’s registry names its managers as Ammon and Matthew McNeff. Utah UCC No. Utah UCC - BAM IP Holdings Business 14333873 Detail On the franchise-sale paperwork itself, the state-filed Franchise Disclosure Documents, Ammon McNeff and Matthew McNeff appear among the listed sellers of the Bricks & Minifigs system. FDD - MN Cards E0034F88 C057 FDD

So the two halves are not separate worlds. They are the same family operating two firms out of the same cluster of Utah towns: Legally Mine and LMRA in Orem Utah UCC No. Utah UCC - LMRA Services Business 10165814 Detail, BAM Franchising a few streets over Utah UCC No. Utah UCC - BAM Franchising Business 11984597 Detail, BAM IP Holdings in Provo Utah UCC No. Utah UCC - BAM IP Holdings Business 14333873 Detail.

And the two halves are stitched together by a financing document that ought to give any reader pause. In August 2020, a Utah UCC filing records that Legally Mine, the asset-protection company, pledged 450,000 shares of BAM Franchising as collateral, to secured parties named John Masek and David Ortiz. Utah UCC - Detail A second filing the following February pledged a 21 percent membership interest in Legally Mine itself, along with its business assets, this time naming Ammon and Matthew McNeff as the secured parties on a settlement note. Utah UCC - Detail The toy franchise was, on paper, security for the family’s debts; the family’s company was, on paper, security for the sons. The ownership of the toy store and the ownership of the shield were the same balance sheet.

#The fight inside the family

That balance sheet did not hold together quietly. In January 2021, the family went to federal court against itself. A complaint filed in the District of Utah alleged, these are allegations, never adjudicated, the suit was voluntarily dismissed Mcneff V Mcneff Utd 2-21-cv-00048 doc12 Voluntary Dismissal 2021-02-10, that Daniel refused to cede authority over BAM’s payments, that the nonpayment triggered a repossession by the company’s sellers, and that more than a million dollars in assets were lost as a result. McNeff v. McNeff, No. 2:21-cv-00048 (D. Utah), Dkt. 2 Around the same time, in a letter, Daniel McNeff described the situation in his own words: the prior owners had been carrying the loan, he wrote, and Ammon and Matthew had been assigned to run BAM full-time. The picture is of a father, two sons, a toy company, and a debt, all pulling against one another.

Meanwhile the asset-protection side kept changing its skin. The original Legally Mine entity was reported to have become “LM OLDCO LLC” Filing History LM OLDCO LLC, Reg. No. 7228976, old company, the linguistic tell of a business shedding a name. And in 2026, fresh “Legally Mine” and “Legally Mine Tax and Accounting” assumed-name registrations appeared in Utah, this time owned not by Daniel but by an entity called Centra Wealth Solutions LLC Filing History Legally Mine 2026 Entity, Reg. No. 14441858 Filing History Legally Mine Tax and Accounting 2026 Entity, Reg. No. 14441864, with a different registered agent. Filing History Centra Wealth Solutions LLC, Reg. No. 14421835 The brand survives; the legal shell beneath it has been quietly swapped out, which is, after all, the entire point of the product.

The larger story is a family that spent the better part of two decades teaching strangers how to put wealth beyond the reach of courts and creditors, and that, when courts and creditors finally came, appears to have reached for the same tools on its own behalf. The toy-store fight is the thread that exposes the structure.

The McNeffs did not invent the model; they bought into it. Legally Mine traces itself, on the firm’s own telling, to the asset-protection seminar circuit of Jay Mitton, the self-styled “father of asset protection”; by that account Daniel McNeff came to the business in 2007 as “a student of Mitton,” by way of Mitton’s National Foundation for Asset Protection. That lineage is a self-attribution drawn from Legally Mine’s own marketing, not a fact established by any court or registry record in this file. The same seminar lineage seeded a cluster of look-alike Orem asset-protection shops, among them Veil Corporate LLC and Guardian Law LLC, both named as defendants in a private fraud suit that arose alongside the Federal Trade Commission’s $16.7 million case against the Nudge real-estate-seminar empire FTC v. Nudge, LLC^⌖; neither is McNeff-owned, and the only tie alleged here is a shared mentor and a shared town, not common ownership. The network surfaces once more around the Salem store itself: Josh Johnson, sold to the public as an “independent” new owner, doubles as an executive vice-president of a Las Vegas asset-protection firm, on a presenter roster he shares with the ex-FBI principal of an outfit called Fortress.

#The wives are the bridge

Daniel's public account is a clean break: he kept Legally Mine, the sons kept Bricks and Minifigs, and he has had nothing to do with the toy franchise since the settlement. The litigation behind that account is genuine. A neutral found that Daniel lied, and the dollar figures are real. But the family did not actually unwire itself. The plumbing that connects the father's asset-protection back end to the sons' Bricks operation runs through the wives, and it is on the registry.