Questions for Anderson Business Advisors
Anderson markets asset protection to investors. Before you buy, here are the questions its own published claims raise - and why the answers matter.
Anderson Business Advisors sells asset protection to real estate investors and business owners, at real volume, through workshops and memberships. If you are considering them, the useful exercise is not to read reviews. It is to read what the company publishes about itself and ask what it means.
Below are the questions their own published claims raise. Nothing here says Anderson has done anything wrong, and nothing here says any of their statements are false. These are questions with good answers available, and if the answers are good they should be easy to give. That is rather the point: a provider's willingness to answer plainly is itself information.
Which company am I actually hiring?
The brand appears under more than one name. "Anderson Advisors" and "Anderson Business Advisors" are used interchangeably; the About page also references Anderson Global; and the team page identifies Anderson Law Group as an entity the founders established.
There is nothing improper about operating through multiple entities - most firms of any size do. The question is simply which one you are contracting with:
- Which legal entity will my engagement agreement name?
- If the advice is wrong, which entity is answerable, and what insurance stands behind it?
- Is that entity a law firm?
That last one is the biggest question on this page, and it deserves its own section.
Am I retaining a law firm, or buying from a consulting company?
The company's own description of itself moves between categories. On the About page it is a "business planning and consulting firm" in one place and a "legal and tax firm" in another. Toby Mathis and Clint Coons are both attorneys, and Anderson Law Group exists as a named entity. But the relationship between the consulting business and the law entity is not set out in plain English anywhere we could find.
This is not semantics. It decides three things you cannot get back later:
- Privilege. Whether what you say is protected from discovery.
- Regulation. Whether the work is subject to bar oversight and a disciplinary process.
- Recourse. Whether a mistake is legal malpractice, with malpractice coverage behind it, or a consumer dispute with a consulting company.
So: when I buy an entity formation, a trust, or a membership, am I a client of a law firm or a customer of a company? Ask for it in writing.
Is the person I am talking to an attorney?
Related, and more urgent than it sounds. A strategy call means describing your assets, your exposure, and sometimes pending litigation.
Attorney-client privilege generally attaches to communications with a lawyer for the purpose of legal advice. A conversation with a salesperson or a non-attorney advisor usually is not privileged - which means it can be discoverable later, by the exact creditor you are planning against.
Ask before the call, not after: is the person I am speaking with an attorney, and is this conversation privileged? If it is not, you should know that before you describe anything.
What do the numbers represent?
The homepage carries a "Fast Facts" figure of "$1B" in assets protected, and describes the company's event as the "#1 Tax, Asset Protection & Wealth Strategy Workshop in the US." The About page refers to "tens of thousands of clients," and Clint Coons's biography there describes growing the firm to "over 400 employees." Elsewhere the company references more than 180,000 workshop attendees and over 100,000 investor tax returns prepared.
Meanwhile the public team page lists 35 people, with names, titles and photographs but no biographies or qualifications.
None of that is a contradiction on its face. Workshop attendees are not clients; employees are not all client-facing; a firm can staff far more people than it publishes. But the questions are fair:
- What does "$1B in assets protected" count, and how is it calculated? Assets placed into structures? Client-reported net worth? Something else?
- Are the client figures current clients, past clients, workshop attendees, or anyone who has ever purchased anything?
- What makes the workshop "#1," and measured by whom?
- Of the people advising clients, how many are attorneys, and what are their qualifications?
A number used to persuade should be a number someone can explain. We take the same view of our own published pricing and our own case-law review, including the decisions that went badly.
What does "make your assets invisible" mean?
The homepage headline is "Make your assets invisible to predatory lawyers," and the featured eBook is titled "How to make your assets invisible."
The underlying idea is legitimate. Privacy structuring genuinely can make ownership harder to establish from a casual public-records search, and for many people that deters a claim before it starts. That is a real benefit and worth paying for.
But "invisible" is doing more work than privacy can support. Once a court has jurisdiction over you, it can order you to disclose your assets under oath. At that point you disclose, or you are in contempt. Nothing about a structure makes property cease to exist, and any plan whose protection depends on a creditor never finding out is a plan that fails precisely when it is tested.
So the question is which one is being sold: privacy from casual searching, or protection that survives a court order? Those are different products at different prices, and the distinction is the whole subject of how asset protection actually works.
What supports the claim about domestic trusts?
The site describes a domestic asset protection trust as providing exceptional protection where an independent trustee controls distributions. Independent-trustee drafting is genuinely better than a self-settled trust the grantor still controls - that part is sound.
What deserves a citation is "exceptional," because three constraints apply regardless of how well the trust is drafted:
- A domestic trustee sits within a U.S. court's contempt power. Ordered to turn assets over, the trustee complies or is sanctioned. That is the structural difference from an offshore trustee, and no drafting closes it.
- Fraudulent-transfer law reaches transfers made with intent to hinder or delay creditors, and can reach transfers made without reasonably equivalent value while insolvent - regardless of who the trustee is.
- Federal bankruptcy law reaches self-settled trusts on a ten-year lookback under 11 U.S.C. § 548(e).
There is also the conflict-of-laws problem: a domestic asset protection trust formed in a favourable state may not be honoured by the courts of a settlor's home state where it offends that state's public policy.
So: what authority supports the protection claim, and under what conditions does it fail? Timing, intent, existing claims and solvency all matter, and a consumer is entitled to hear the limits alongside the benefits.
Does Anderson actually deliver offshore trusts?
The company advertises foreign asset protection trusts. That raises a straightforward operational question rather than a critical one:
- Is this a service regularly provided, or an occasional referral?
- Which licensed offshore trustee company administers them?
- How many has the firm established in the last year?
If it is a regularly delivered service, those are easy answers. If it is not, a prospective client should know that before choosing a provider for it - not because there is anything wrong with referring work out, but because who administers your trust is most of what you are buying.
What does "featured in" mean?
The homepage carries a "Featured In" row including Forbes. That badge covers several very different things: editorial coverage a journalist decided to write, a quoted interview, a paid contributor column, or a press release carried by a syndication wire.
All four produce the same logo. Only some are third-party validation. Ask which it was, and ask for the link.
The point of asking
The tools Anderson sells - LLCs, land trusts, privacy structuring, domestic trusts - are legitimate and widely used. This is not a piece arguing otherwise.
The point is that when you buy a complex legal structure, four things should be written down before money changes hands:
- What exactly am I buying?
- Which entity am I buying it from?
- Who is delivering the advice, and are they an attorney?
- What protection do I have as a client if it is wrong?
Ask any provider those four questions. Ask us. A firm that answers them plainly and in writing is showing you how it will behave when something goes wrong, and a firm that will not is showing you the same thing.
If you believe you were sold planning that was misrepresented to you, you can tell us what you saw.
This article discusses publicly published marketing claims as they appeared on andersonadvisors.com. It does not allege that any statement is false or that any law was broken. Anderson Business Advisors is not affiliated with Blake Harris Law, and we compete with them. Note also that "the Anderson case" elsewhere on this site refers to FTC v. Affordable Media, an unrelated court decision.
Frequently asked
Frequently asked questions
That is the question worth asking them directly, in writing. The company describes itself on its own site as a business planning and consulting firm and as a legal and tax firm, and its team page identifies Anderson Law Group as an entity its founders established. Those are different things, and the relationship between them is not spelled out in plain terms anywhere we could find. Ask which entity your engagement is with, which entity is responsible if something goes wrong, and whether the person advising you is an attorney.
Privacy techniques can genuinely make ownership harder to find in a casual public-records search, and that has real value. What they cannot do is survive a court order. Once a court with jurisdiction over you orders disclosure, you disclose or you face contempt - and a structure sold on invisibility rather than on enforceable law is a structure whose protection ends at the moment it is tested. Ask what happens when a judge orders an accounting.
Not by itself. Plenty of firms staff more people than they publish, and there is nothing improper about it. The reason to ask is narrower: you are buying advice, so you are entitled to know the qualifications of the person giving it to you. A page of names and titles without qualifications does not answer that, whatever the headcount is.
It is better than a self-settled trust the grantor still controls, but it is not the same as offshore protection, and the difference is jurisdictional rather than a matter of drafting quality. A domestic trustee is subject to a U.S. court's contempt power. Transfers remain reachable under fraudulent-transfer law, and federal bankruptcy law reaches self-settled trusts on a ten-year lookback. Ask what legal authority supports any claim of exceptional protection, and under what conditions it fails.
Generally no. Privilege attaches to communications with a lawyer for the purpose of obtaining legal advice; a conversation with a salesperson or a non-attorney advisor is usually not privileged, which means it can be discoverable later. Before you describe your assets, your creditors or your litigation to anyone, ask whether the person is an attorney and whether the call is privileged - and get the answer before you talk, not after.
It can mean editorial coverage a journalist chose to write, a quoted interview, a paid contributor column, or a press release carried by a syndication service. Those are very different signals, and the logos look identical. Ask which one it was and ask for the link.