Resources for creating a California LLC partnership?

April 24, 2017 12:41 PM

Can you point me to resources on how to create a California LLC partnership?

We will have things reviewed by an attorney before we file, but my partner and I would like to do as much research and planning as we can to make sure we understand our options and are as informed as possible. Blog posts, sites, books, and any other resources are welcome.

Here is the state's resource page on the subject, which is about the extent of my knowledge at the moment.

That page makes it seem as though the largest hurdle will be creating an operating agreement. My partner and I will be equal owners and managers in the business. Am I right in thinking that it is the operating agreement that would spell out explicit areas of control, how we make decisions, how to buy out the other if necessary, how to split profits, etc?

Again, we *will* have pay an attorney to consult with us and review things before we file, so consider that advice given.

posted by Number Used Once to Work & Money (4 answers total)

IAAL. IANYL. Hiring an attorney to "review" docs that you've prepared is a plausible way of proceeding (i.e., you could do that and it wouldn't necessarily be a dumpster fire), but it's probably not the most efficient course. You'd probably get better value for your legal dollar by hiring a lawyer to talk to you about how LLCs work (if you don't already know) and give you a list of things that you should consider and figure out how you want them to work, before you write those instructions down in your agreement.

The filling-out of forms and the writing of legal boilerplate is not what you pay a lawyer for, if you care about getting your money's worth.
posted by spacewrench at 12:52 PM on April 24, 2017 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thanks spacewrench! Now that you've said it no one else has to.
posted by Number Used Once at 1:11 PM on April 24, 2017

Here is CA's resources for the actual forming of the LLC with the state. I form LLCs as my day job and if you can't drop your stuff off in person I would strongly suggest using a service company only because CA is extremely flaky about mailed-in documents, even when expedited. We partner with a company in CA to do this just because of how many filings of ours they lost. It costs our clients more but they are much, much happier in the general.

If you're filing without a filing company: do not expedite unless you absolutely 100% need to and will lose a massive amount of money if you do not. The fee is huge: $350 (no other state even comes close to this kind of expediting fee) and the full fee is confiscated if you mess up a part of the filing and the state rejects it.

This filing is separate from the operating agreement, which is not filed with the state but retained internally. There are very few options to select when filing with the state (basically you just give them your company name, name of the registered agent and a couple of addresses) so 99% of the details would be hammered out in the OA.
posted by griphus at 1:16 PM on April 24, 2017 [1 favorite]

Oh, and after you submit, keep an eye on this page for when you can expect your entity to pop up in the system.
posted by griphus at 1:17 PM on April 24, 2017