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AALS Section on Agency, Partnerships, LLCs, and Unincorporated Associations

Calls for Papers

The AALS Section on Agency, Partnerships, LLCs, and Unincorporated Associations is pleased to announce two calls for papers, one for a panel presentation and one for a works-in progress session geared to workshopping the research and writing of junior faculty.

Panel Presentation:

Up to three paper presenters will be selected for the section's principal panel to be held during the AALS 2025 Annual Meeting in San Francisco, CA. The program is entitled Technology's Intersection with Agency, Partnerships, and Unincorporated Associations. Co-Sponsored by the Sections on Technology, Law and Legal Education and Transactional Law and Skills, the session is designed to explore research and teaching involving the interactions of principal/agent relationships, partnerships, and unincorporated business associations with artificial intelligence, blockchains, cybersecurity, and other technological developments.

Works-in-Progress Session:

The section seeks paper proposals from junior scholars for a works-in-progress program.  Submissions for this session may relate to any topic within the scope of the law governing agency, partnerships, LLCs, or unincorporated associations.

Submission Information: 

To respond to either or both calls for papers, please submit a substantial abstract (five or more pages) or draft of an unpublished paper to…

It's been little while since I posted here, but long-time readers of theis blog will not be surprised by the topic.  I am happy to say that, after a lot of work with an exceptional co-author who shares my concerns, Professor Samantha Prince from Penn State Dickinson Law, we have an article documenting the problems with mislabeling LLCs and providing a variety of solutions.  I have been writing on this for nearly 15 years, and unfortunately, not a lot has changed. 

The article, An LLC By Any Other Name Is Still Not A Corporation, is now available on SSRN, here, and has been submitted for publication. In the meantime, we welcome thoughts and comments.  

Here is the abstract: 

Business entities have their own unique characteristics. Entrepreneurs and lawyers who represent them select an entity structure based on the business’s current and projected needs. The differing needs of each business span across myriad topics such as capital requirements, taxation, employee benefits, and personal liability protection. These choices present advantages and disadvantages many of which are built into the type of entity chosen.

It is critically important that people, especially lawyers, recognize the difference between entities such as corporations…

The University of Tennessee College of Law's business law journal, Transactions: The Tennessee Journal of Business Law, recently published my essay, "The Fiduciary-ness of Business Associations."  You can find the essay here.  This essay–or parts of it, anyway–has been rattling around in my brain for a bit.   It is nice on a project like this to be able to get the words out on a page and release all that tension building up inside as you fashion your approach.

The abstract for the essay is included below. 

This essay offers a window and perspective on recent fiduciary-related legislative developments in business entity law and identifies and reflects in limited part on related professional responsibility questions impacting lawyers advising business entities and their equity owners. In addition—and perhaps more pointedly—the essay offers commentary on legal change and the legislative process for state law business associations amendments in and outside the realm of fiduciary duties. To accomplish these purposes, the essay first provides a short description of the position of fiduciary duties in U.S. statutory business entity law and offers a brief account of 21st century business entity legislation that weakens the historically central role of fiduciary duties in unincorporated…

On Friday, I have the honor and pleasure of presenting a continuing legal education session for the Tennessee Bar Association with Dean Matt Lyon from the LMU Duncan School of Law.  Our topic?  Partner freeze-outs–situations in which a co-venturer in a business recognized as a partnership is excluded from the business by their fellow co-venturers.  This exclusion often occurs through or involves the formation of a limited liability entity, typically a corporation or limited liability company, to conduct the operations of the business going forward.  That new business entity does not include one of the initial co-venturers.  We have titled our session "No Partner Left Behind:Organizing a Limited Liability Entity for a Pre-existing Business Venture."

I truly enjoy the judicial opinions in this area.  You probably know some of them.  Holmes v. Lerner may be one of the better known cases in this space.  But there are others.  Some of the claims in these cases, like the claims in Holmes v. Lerner, stem from co-venturers involved in a de facto partnership–a venture recognized under statutory law as a partnership for which there is no express written acknowledgment of partnership.  Entrepreneurs beware!

The partnership freeze-out genre of judicial opinions is…

It's been one week since I announced and started posting in this virtual symposium on the NextGen Bar Exam. Thanks to Josh, Ben, and John for joining me in commenting on the proposed content scope outline relating to Business Associations and Relationships.  You can find their posts here, here, and here, respectively. 

We have raised issues about terminology.  And there are a few areas that are lacking in clarity or specificity.  In addition, two important overarching points have emerged to date in our posts.  One is that it is important to indicate the source of the law being tested, since the default rules operative in various areas of LLC and corporate law are not the same in the dominant national statutory frameworks.  (I offer another example of how this may matter in the discussion of corporate director and officer fiduciary duties, below.)  The other is that the default rules in business associations law tell only part of the story.   Constitutional issues, authorized private ordering, and decisional law that both supplements and interprets state legislative enactments can all play roles.

In this post, I offer a few more points that illustrate or add to these observations.

Partnership Nomenclature…

I recently received the final version of my short article, "The Benefits and Burdens of Limited Liability," in Transactions: The Tennessee Journal of Business Law.  The article is based on some of my prior blog posts, as well as my presentation as part of the fourth annual Business Law Prof Blog symposium, Connecting the Threads. It was great event, as always, thanks to Joan and the whole crew at Tennessee Law, and it was my pleasure to be part of it.  

Here's the abstract: 

Law students in business associations and people starting businesses often think the only choice for forming a business entity is a limited liability entity like a corporation or a limited liability company (LLC). Although seeking a limited liability entity is usually justifiable, and usually wise, this Article addresses some of the burdens that come from making that decision. We often focus only on the benefits. This Article ponders limited liability as a default rule for contracts with a named business and considers circumstances when choosing a limited liability entity might not communicate what a business owner intends. The Article notes also that when choosing an entity, you get benefits, like limited liability,

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Call for Papers
AALS Section on Agency, Partnership, LLCs & Unincorporated Associations 

Entrepreneurship and the Entity 

January 5-9, 2021, AALS Annual Meeting 

The AALS Section on Agency, Partnership, LLCs & Unincorporated Associations will sponsor a panel on “Entrepreneurship and the Entity” at the 2021 AALS Annual Meeting in San Francisco, California. This panel will showcase scholarship on subjects relating to business law and entrepreneurship, including entity choice throughout a company’s evolution, financing alternatives, and how legal rules promote and discourage different kinds of entrepreneurship. Scholars are encouraged to interpret the subject of the Call for Papers broadly and creatively. 

SUBMISSION PROCEDURE: Scholars should send a summary of a work or a work-in-progress of no more than 600 words to Professor Sarah C. Haan at haans@wlu.edu on or before Friday, August 21, 2020. The summary should be a pdf or Word document that has been stripped of information identifying the author; only the cover email should connect the author to the submission. The subject line of the email should read: “Submission—[author name & title].” Papers will be selected through an anonymous review by the Section’s Executive Committee. 

SPECIAL NOTE: Interested parties are encouraged to submit…

As a new dean in a new city, I have had the opportunity to meet hundreds of impressive lawyers in Omaha.  I have been incredibly impressed by the sophisticated practices at the very law firms I have visited. For "midsized" firms, there are lawyers doing incredible work here that is the same work being done on the coasts, including some amazing M & A work. 

But here in Omaha, just like every city around the country, law firms have "corporate" practices.  But really, those are business law practices or transactional practices.  Almost every corporation of significant size also owns some LLCs (limited liability companies) and perhaps other entities. And certainly these firms, especially those working with real estate companies, will work with LLCs and other pass through entities.  

So, consistent with my prior posts on this subject, I urge lawyers and firms to acknowledge the full scope of what we do.  It's not just corporate.  It's so much more. And that's a good thing. I just ask that we embrace business practice or transactional practice to try to include all we do.   

 

 

 

Last Friday, a new opinion from the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit tackled a complex application of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) law that required an analysis of “federal partnership law,” which assessed whether two entities had created a “partnership-in-fact, as a matter of federal common law.”  Sun Capital Partners III, LP v. New England Teamsters & Trucking Indus. Pension Fund, No. 16-1376, 2019 WL 6243370, at *5 (1st Cir. Nov. 22, 2019). I hate the idea of “federal partnership law,” but I concede it is a thing for determining certain responsibilities under the tax code and ERISA. I still maintain that rather than discussing federal entity law and entity type in these cases, we should instead be discussing liability under certain code sections as they apply to the relevant persons and/or entities.  Nonetheless, that’s not the state of the law.

Even though I don’t like the concept of federal partnership law, I can work with it. As such, I think it is fair to ask courts to respect entity types if they are going to insist on using entity types to determine liability. Alas, this is too…

A 2017 opinion related to successor liability just posted to Westlaw.  The case is an EEOC claim "against the Hospital of St. Raphael School of Nurse Anesthesia (“HSR School”) and Anesthesia Associates of New Haven (“AANH”), alleging gender discrimination and retaliation in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 . . . ." The plaintiff was seeking to join Yale New Haven Hospital (“YNHH”). MARGARITE CONSOLMAGNO v. HOSPITAL OF ST. RAPHAEL SCHOOL OF NURSE ANESTHESIA and ANESTHESIA ASSOCIATES OF NEW HAVEN, P.C., 3:11CV109 (DJS), 2017 WL 10966446, at *1 (D. Conn. Mar. 27, 2017). 

 
 
Apparently, the HSR School trained nurse anesthetists was owned and run by AANH a Connecticut “professional corporation.”  The plaintiff was in the HSR School for about six months before she was dismissed, she claimed, because of " gender discrimination and retaliation for reporting a staff member’s inappropriate sexual conduct." Id. The plaintiff sought to join YNHH because that entity took over running an anesthesia school that had been, in some form, the HSR school.  
 
The successor liability part is rather interesting, though largely devoid of facts from the transaction.  The court ultimately concludes that even though YNHH resumed a similar school,

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