new jersey llc

New Jersey Limited Liability Company Attorneys

Imagine that the limited liability company you and your partners started five years ago is involved in a nasty corporate governance lawsuit. Perhaps one of the partners needs to be expelled, or maybe one of the owners is involved in a competing business. Imagine that you are spending tens of thousands of dollars every month on legal fees, that the business is in a state of constant disruption and that you haven’t had a good night’s sleep in weeks.

And now, accept the fact that this could have been avoided.

The chances are that if a closely held business is involved in this type of litigation it is because the owners did not plan well when they started the business. How do I know? Having litigated many of these matters over the years, I see the same mistakes made early in the life of the business surfacing again and again as the source of litigation.

New Jersey Limited Liability Company Operating Agreement

This is my non-exclusive list of what I think are the most expensive mistakes that I see people make in their business. There are others, to be sure, but these are the ones that I see as the source of litigation among the members.

No Operating Agreement: Actually, I am not going to count not having an operating agreement as one of the five “mistakes.” It is not really a mistake, it is a colossal blunder, kind of like drunk driving – you may get away with it for a while, but you know how it’s going to end.

Operating Agreements for Limited Liability Companies to Change Under Revised Limited Liability Company Act

Part of an ongoing series on the adoption of New Jersey’s revised limited liability company act.

The amendments to the New Jersey’s Limited Liability Company Act, N.J.S.A. 42:2C-1-94 that begin to take effect in March 2013 will bring a new era in the way the members of a limited liabilit industry-agreement y company structure their affairs. The days in which the members must put their agreements in writing will soon be over, and the owners of New Jersey LLCs should take a hard look at their own operating agreements and course of doing business.

In adopting the Revised Uniform Limited Liability Company Act, the state legislature has approved a fundamental change to the way LLCs operate in New Jersey. We are examining these changes in a series of articles and today focus on the effect of the changed definition of operating agreements.

Written Operating Agreements Not Required

The old law may have been rigid, but at least it was clear. It was not required in New Jersey (as in some other states) to have an operating agreement, but if you did, it had to be in writing. If there was no written operating agreement, then the “default” rules provided by the statute governed. That has changed significantly. The new law defines an operating agreement as

“the agreement, whether or not referred to as an operating agree

ment and whether oral, in a record, implied, or in any combination thereof, of all the members of a limited l

iability company …”

To understand just how much of a change is this definition, we can look at a 2004 decision of the Appellate Division in Kuhn v. Tuminelli, 366 N.J. Super. 431, 841 A.2d 496 (App. Div. 2004). In that case, the plaintiff and defendant owned a limosine service and the defendant embezzled funds by endorsing checks to the company and keeping the funds. Kuhn argued that the defendant did not have authority to convert the checks and named as a defendant the check cashing service that had negotiated the checks.

Articles Tagged with new jersey llc

Five Expensive Mistakes When Forming a New Jersey LLC

New Jersey Limited Liability Company Attorneys

New Jersey Limited Liability Company Operating Agreement

New Jersey Limited Liability Company Operating Agreements

Part of an ongoing series on the adoption of New Jersey’s revised limited liability company act.

Written Operating Agreements Not Required