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 business registry, entity No. 10165814 (LMRA Services) 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 business registry, entity No. 8097970 (Legal Bear), to Procure LLC Utah business registry, entity No. 10875462 (Procure), to Team Dentistry LLC Utah business registry, entity No. 13558625 (Team Dentistry), to DDL Investments LLC Utah business registry, entity No. 12343181 (DDL Investments), and to Medisource Marketing LLC Utah business registry, entity No. 9224895 (Medisource Marketing), 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. Ohio UPL docket, No. 2025-0037 ↗ 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, its managers named on Utah’s registry as Ammon and Matthew McNeff, yet the marks still name BAM Franchising and no transfer has surfaced; the trademarks section traces that gap in full. Utah business registry, entity No. 14333873 (BAM IP Holdings) 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. BAM Franchise Disclosure Document

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 business registry, entity No. 10165814 (LMRA Services), BAM Franchising a few streets over Utah business registry, entity No. 11984597 (BAM Franchising), BAM IP Holdings in Provo Utah business registry, entity No. 14333873 (BAM IP Holdings).

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 Thompson family node

One American Fork family sits at the seam where the asset-protection machine touches the town’s banking and political establishment. The connective tissue is not a shared company or a co-signed deed. It is kinship, confirmed on the hardest kind of record there is: a parent’s obituary that lists the children by name. When Heber Maughan Thompson died in 2011, the published death notice named his eight children (Deseret News, 2011), and two of those names matter here. One son is a senior officer of the bank that originated the Legally Mine pandemic loan. Another son was installed by Daniel McNeff to run Legally Mine and is a defendant in the family’s own lawsuit. The obituary makes them brothers.

Heber Maughan Thompson was the Mayor of American Fork from 2006 to 2010, a matter of public record. Before that, the city’s business registry shows him listed as a President of a small Main Street nonprofit, Downtown American Fork, Inc., in its 2004 annual report, alongside the bank figure Dale Gunther. Downtown American Fork, Inc. would go dormant after that filing and was never revived. He also sat as a trustee of the American Fork Community Foundation with Gunther and a Rodeback, the same names that ran the downtown brand. None of this imputes anything improper to a former mayor; it is the civic backdrop against which his sons’ roles came to overlap with the McNeff enterprise.

The first son is Brian D. Thompson. By his own published biography he has been with Bank of American Fork, later Altabank, since 1992, and Senior Vice President of Treasury and Administration since 2012 (his published bio). That bank is the confirmed originating lender of the $1,393,440 Paycheck Protection Program loan to Legally Mine, approved in late April 2020. The loan itself is a public fact. What is only an allegation, and must be read as one, is the sons’ claim in their federal complaint that, in their words, Lindsey’s brother is a senior vice president of Altabank who was involved in obtaining the loan. McNeff v. McNeff, No. 2:21-cv-00048, para 47 (D. Utah)^⌖ The complaint does not name the brother. Brian D. Thompson is the best public fit for the seat the paragraph describes, but that paragraph is one side’s pleading, no court has ruled on it, and the presumption of innocence applies to him in full. His banking role and his place in the family are neutral facts; the rest is an unproven accusation.

Brian Thompson’s biography also lists civic titles, among them Chairman of the PARC Tax Board and President of Downtown American Fork, Inc. The presidency line was once read as a stale reference to a dead nonprofit, but that reading was a mistake of taking registry silence for refutation. Dale Gunther, the other President of record of that same dead shell, describes the identical seat in his own biography as President of the American Fork Downtown Improvement Committee. The dormant corporation was the incorporated arm of a real city downtown-improvement committee, the predecessor to today’s redevelopment agency function. So the title is a true, self-declared civic credential rather than a fiction. What the registry does not show is Brian’s own name on any of that nonprofit’s four filings; the only Thompson on record there is his father Heber. Brian’s specific tenure on that body, and any personal link between him and a live redevelopment disbursement, remain unresolved behind the city’s archived committee minutes and the pre-acquisition bank officer rosters that are not open to inspection. The record carries the role he claims, and the line the record draws stops there.

The second son is Lindsey Stewart Thompson. According to the sons’ complaint, Daniel McNeff installed him as the acting, then permanent, President of Legally Mine after removing Ammon, and the complaint calls him Daniel’s personal puppet. McNeff v. McNeff, No. 2:21-cv-00048, paras 31-32 (D. Utah)^⌖ Those are allegations. What is documented on the registry is sturdier and, for the shape of this network, more telling. Lindsey Stewart Thompson is a member, with Daniel McNeff and David Gibb, of DDL Investments, LLC, registered to LMRA Services at the Orem hub and formed in 2021. DDL is the single hardest unity-of-enterprise fact in the whole file: the exact trio named together in the New York creditor suit kept operating together, in one Utah LLC hung off the captive registered agent, after the family litigation was over. He is also the sole member of Berget & Mesh, LLC, an opaquely named, empty holding shell formed in October 2020, in the same weeks the Legally Mine operating entity was being converted from an LLC into a corporation, again registered to LMRA Services and again holding nothing and filing nothing. Berget and Mesh are not the surnames of anyone involved; the name carries no meaning on its face. It is a ready value-container slot on the McNeff agent hub, in the name of the man Daniel installed to run the company.

What binds the three together is worth stating precisely, because the discipline of this map turns on not overclaiming. The Thompsons are not joined to the machine by a co-owned company that crosses from the bank to Legally Mine, and no such instrument is asserted here. They are joined by blood, by civic title, and by the lender tier. The father held the mayoralty and a downtown-committee presidency. One son runs treasury at the bank that wrote the pandemic loan. The other son runs the borrower and shares a captive-agent shell with the borrower’s owner. A bank officer being the brother of the company’s installed president is not, by itself, proof of anything. It is an aggregating signal, one more reason the walls between these entities are thinner than they look, and it sits beside the machine rather than inside it. The one allegation that would move a Thompson from the periphery to the center, the claim that Brian helped obtain the loan, is exactly that, an allegation in a pleading, and it is graded and shown as nothing more.

#The money the family war exposed

One number sits at the center of the fight: a $1.4 million federal loan, drawn from a bank in the family’s own town, that the sons say was emptied into a secret account before anyone outside the inner circle knew it had funded.

CONFIRMED (SBA) On April 27, 2020, the Small Business Administration approved a Paycheck Protection Program loan of $1,393,440 to Legally Mine, LLC. That much is a matter of public record, published on the SBA’s own disclosure of every loan above $150,000: borrower Legally Mine, loan number 3842137205, ninety-nine jobs reported, and an originating lender named Altabank, the division of the old Bank of American Fork headquartered in American Fork, Utah, with Glacier Bank servicing it. The SBA’s public loan file lists no other Paycheck Protection loan anywhere in the family’s web of entities. There was no separate loan for the registered-agent mill, for the Alaska shells, for the foundation, or for the toy company. The whole draw came through one borrower, in one loan, from one bank.

That detail, that the lender was the family’s hometown bank, is where the public record meets the sons’ sworn account. Daniel McNeff controlled the borrower; the arbitrator who ended the family fight confirmed his seventy-nine percent ownership and managing control. What happened to the money after it landed is the heart of the complaint his sons filed in federal court, and every line of it is an allegation, sworn but never tested, because the suit was voluntarily dismissed before any judge ruled on the merits.

ALLEGED By the sons’ account, the proceeds did not go to payroll. The complaint alleges that the family opened a dedicated Altabank account without the plaintiffs’ knowledge or consent, and that within weeks the loan was paid out of it: a $113,000 check to Daniel McNeff on May 18, then a $300,000 check to him on June 2, signed, the pleading says, in the middle of the arbitration. McNeff v. McNeff, No. 2:21-cv-00048, paras 63, 67 (D. Utah)^⌖ The same account, the complaint continues, cut a $60,000 check marked “Legal Fees” to the family’s own counsel, Anderson, Fife and Marshall, and a $71,848 check to Tax Pro Tax and Accounting, the firm of the family’s bookkeeper Martin Evans. McNeff v. McNeff, No. 2:21-cv-00048, paras 68, 94 (D. Utah)^⌖ Smaller sums went to David Gibb and to the man Daniel had installed to run Legally Mine, Lindsey Thompson. These are the plaintiffs’ figures, drawn from check images attached to their pleading; none has been adjudicated, and Daniel McNeff is entitled to the presumption of innocence on all of them.

ALLEGED The detail the sons found most damning concerns timing and the lawyers. According to the complaint, on May 12, 2020, the family’s counsel represented in writing that the Paycheck Protection loan “has not been funded”, a representation made, the pleading says, on the eve of the funding that the bank records would show. McNeff v. McNeff, No. 2:21-cv-00048, paras 58-60 (D. Utah)^⌖ Anderson, Fife and Marshall, and the attorney Thomas Seiler within it, were both Daniel’s personal counsel and named co-defendants in the suit. That a firm sits as a party’s lawyer is a confirmed fact of the docket; the note’s dating and the “not funded” letter are allegations, and nothing here finds that the firm did anything other than represent its client.

The bank is woven into this story in one more way that owes nothing to the family fight. CONFIRMED (recorder) The same Bank of American Fork that originated Legally Mine’s loan was the lender behind the downtown American Fork development ring already mapped in this record. On a parcel in American Fork (serial 02:038:0012), the bank carried roughly $780,000 in two 2019 deeds of trust to Drive Ventures, the vehicle of developer Skyler Meine; on a Provo parcel (serial 45:455:0104), it both took title and carried the financing for Grant Collard’s Redstone assembly from 2012 through 2025. These are convergences at the lender, not the ledger. The developers’ entities share the family’s bank and mirror the same real-estate asset-protection method, both of which are aggregating signals, but every test for shared ownership, common membership, or a co-signed instrument between the developers and the McNeff web came back negative on the document or resolved to a namesake. The shared bank is a fact; a shared enterprise is not established, and the developers are owed the same restraint as any private parties named here.

#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.

That war was real, and it should be conceded plainly, because the concession is what makes the rest credible. Daniel kept Legally Mine; the arbitrator confirmed his seventy-nine percent ownership and managing control of it, and this page does not claim Ammon ran the asset-protection machine. But the intrafamily fight is a different axis, and it does not separate Ammon from the franchise-and-silencing enterprise his own words and filings place him inside. On camera he is introduced as “the CEO of BAM” and lets it stand, and says the franchise Operations Manual runs “in our sole discretion.” He signed BAM’s Delaware certificate of merger as president. He and Matthew organized BAM IP Holdings, the vehicle built to hold the brand, about twenty days after Castle Funding sued. He and Matthew are the insider creditors on the $1,728,000 note, and the sons’ own verified answer in the Sumsion fee suit, sworn under criminal penalty, is theirs. And it was the sons’ own federal complaint that swore the concealed Altabank account and the diverted checks. On his own recorded account he even framed the pursuit of the critic as “a temporary restraining order filed against those who participated in the fictitious videos.” A man does not have to run every company his family owns to run the one that took in the franchise money and moved to silence the reporting about it. What the war changes is which brother controlled which entity; it does not change that Ammon controlled the BAM side and drove the silencing.

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, Utah business registry, entity No. 14681035 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 even surfaces around the Salem store itself, where the “independent” new owner turns out to be an asset-protection insider, the pattern, named in full alongside the rest of the cross-state web.