CONFIRMED · federal docket + public record
When the franchisor’s racketeering suit against the YouTuber Ben Schneider was removed to the United States District Court for the District of Utah on June 26, it drew a magistrate judge, and the docket became 2:26-cv-00593-CMR. The CMR is Cecilia M. Romero. Because she now sits on the case, the public record on her is worth setting out plainly: both who she is, and what turns up when you check her against everyone else in this story. The short version is that she is a respected jurist, and on the conflict axis she is clean.
Romero earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Utah in 1998 and a law degree from the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law in 2002, where she was a note and comment editor on the Utah Law Review. Her entire private practice was at Holland & Hart in Salt Lake City, where she became a partner litigating employment and commercial cases, defending companies against discrimination, wage-and-hour, non-compete and contract claims; in 2018 she was the exclusive Utah winner of the Lexology and International Law Office Client Choice award for employment law. The district’s judges appointed her a United States Magistrate Judge effective June 1, 2019, succeeding Magistrate Judge Brooke Wells. She is the first Native American to serve as a magistrate in Utah, her mother a registered member of the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe. In January 2026 she began a five-year term as the district’s Chief Magistrate Judge.
Romero has handled American Fork Police Department before. She wrote the report and recommendation in Brown v. American Fork Police Department (2:23-cv-00578), a civil-rights suit that was dismissed and is now on appeal at the Tenth Circuit, and she was referred Hulse v. American Fork Police Department (2:24-cv-00367). Both of those suits, like the other recent civil-rights cases against the department, ended on procedural grounds, self-represented plaintiffs who did not carry the case forward, not on any merits ruling about the department’s conduct. A judge is assigned her cases; she does not pick them.
Because she now presides, we ran Romero and her former firm against every party in this story: Daniel McNeff and Legally Mine, LMRA Services and Centra Wealth, Bricks & Minifigs and BAM Franchising, Ammon and Matthew McNeff, Fortune Law, Dentons, the Soelberg and Mitton asset-protection world, and American Fork City and its police. Nothing connects her, or Holland & Hart, to any of them. On the record we can search, she is clean.
The fair counterpoint. The fair, and likely correct, reading is the innocent one. Judges are assigned their cases; presiding over a party’s suit says nothing about how it will be decided. Romero’s conflict record is clean, her career is distinguished, and the civil-rights suits against American Fork that reached her failed for the ordinary reason self-represented cases fail, missed deadlines and abandoned prosecution, not a thumb on the scale. We publish who is on the case because the public is entitled to know, not because the record shows anything improper. It does not.
Sources: the federal docket, BAM Franchising v. Schneider, No. 2:26-cv-00593-CMR (D. Utah); the District of Utah court biography; Ballotpedia; the dockets in Brown (2:23-cv-00578) and Hulse (2:24-cv-00367); and the public record on Ross I. Romero. How the case reached federal court is in the previous update; the lawyer noted above is covered in One lawyer.
The BAM Map is independent reporting on matters of public concern. Nothing here is a finding of any person’s guilt; the criminal charges referenced are unadjudicated and every defendant is presumed innocent. Sources are linked so readers can check the record. · Home · Map · The law · Bodycam