New ABA book a guide to understanding judgment creditor rights against LLC members
The American Bar Association Business Law Section has published “The Charging Orders Practice Guide: Understanding Judgment Creditor Rights Against LLC Members,” which provides lawyers with a source of both the legal theory underlying charging orders and pragmatic suggestions as to how to deal with limited liability companies from all viewpoints.
LLCs have become the predominant form of business entity created for American businesses, far surpassing annually the numbers of new corporations. Among the features that have made LLCs attractive is that membership interests are not subject to the traditional remedies, such as writs of levy, that have long been available to the creditors of shareholders. Instead, a creditor’s recovery against the LLC interest of debtor is restricted to a heretofore little- discussed remedy known as a “charging order.”
Corresponding to the rise of LLCs, creditor-debtor litigation involving LLC membership interests has likewise increased in volume. This has created a need for creditors, debtors, non-debtor members, the LLC and even potential third-party buyers of LLC interests at a foreclosure sale of charging orders to be able to come up-to-speed quickly on the subject of charging order.
Written by Jay D. Adkisson, whose practice focuses on creditor-debtor law and captive insurance with offices in Las Vegas and Newport Beach, Calif., “The Charging Orders Practice Guide” discusses a broad array of issues involving this remedy, including:
• The history and legal theory underpinning charging orders
• Creditors’ strategies and tactics for obtaining charging orders and using them for maximum effect to enforce judgments
• Step-by-step guidance to obtaining and enforcing a charging order
• Debtor defenses to a charging order
• Counseling an LLC on how to respond to a charging order
• Charging orders and single-member LLCs
• Intra-member disputes involving charging orders
• The charging order in bankruptcy
• Tax issues as seen through the eyes of all the parties to charging order litigation
As a bonus, the appendices include sample charging order documents, plus two 50-state tables listing state statutes and the most important charging order decisions by Suffolk University Law School professor Carter Bishop.
Members of the ABA Business Law Section’s LLCs, Partnerships and Unincorporated Entities Committee were also contributors to “The Charging Orders Practice Guide.”
New ABA book ‘Legal Upheaval’ looks at innovative ways to achieve success in law
In today’s legal marketplace, clients are demanding services that require a new skill set and a new mindset from their lawyers. In “Legal Upheaval: A Guide to Creativity, Collaboration, and Innovation in Law”, a new ABA release, University of Miami School of Law professor Michele DeStefano details the trifecta for success in a changed legal landscape: creativity, collaboration, and innovation.
Based in part on over 100 interviews of general counsels of large, international corporations, managing partners and heads of innovation at law firms around the world, DeStefano explores the changing legal marketplace, the new expectations of lawyers and the gaps that exist in skills, mindset and behaviors. She then discusses how law firm leaders can help lawyers meet these new expectations and fill in the gaps.
With helpful case studies and explanations, as well as concrete directions and tips, “Legal Upheaval” makes collaboration and innovation accessible.
DeStefano is guest faculty at Harvard Law School’s Executive Education and the founder of LawWithoutWalls, a multi-disciplinary, international think tank of more than 1,000 lawyers, business professionals, entrepreneurs and law and business students who collaborate to solve problems and create innovation at the intersection of law, business and technology. She is also the founder of MOVELDW, which offers workshops and bespoke experiential learning programs designed to retrain lawyers, develop new collaboration norms and change culture inside legal departments and law firms.
