The word “Couture” sounds like “co-tour”, and is widely used in the fashion industry to mean “the design and manufacture of fashionable clothes to a client’s specific requirements and measurements.” We thought COUTURE would be a good word to describe our expert system that helps generate a high-quality, highly customized Operating Agreement.

We wrote a very sophisticated document assembly system — an expert system — to help generate your Operating Agreement. An Operating Agreement that:

• Takes into account the very latest legal requirements and tax code
• Permits significant customizations (over 100)
• Possesses granular and sophisticated options for voting, powers and control
• Serious capabilities around dissociation and valuation
• Comes with customized How-To Guides regarding voting and tax issues
• And much, much more

Before the Couture Operating Agreement, business owners really had only two options: To accept and use a poorly worded (and not very customized) template, or to spend thousands of dollars hiring an attorney to draft a customized Operating Agreement.

Now, the Couture Operating Agreement provides the best of both worlds: A low-cost, high-quality, highly customized Operating Agreement. Only available from L4BS.

Our system has three components:

The first component asks basic questions about your LLC (i.e. the name, address, tax status, member versus manager managed, etc).

The second component then gives you the option to either accept our defaults or drill-down into different areas that are important to you.

The third component generates the documents, delivering them to you in PDF and MS Word format. We deliver both, because the PDF is generally easy to handle and print. The MS Word version, however, is a fully editable document that you (or your attorney) can modify to ensure the Operating Agreement meets all your needs.

The documents that are generated by this third component include:

• An Instructional Overview — that explains next steps and recommended tasks.
• The Operating Agreement itself
• Schedule A for List of Members
• Schedule B for List of Intellectual Property (IP) (if needed)
• A How-To Guide regarding Voting
• A How-To Guide regarding Taxes
• A Corporate Resolution Template
• A Spousal Consent Template (if appropriate)

This is a great question, and perhaps best answered with a few facts regarding law firms.

The first fact is that we law firms don’t make a lot of money creating LLC’s or selling template documents. We make our money with disputes — lawsuits to be specific. Almost 50% of L4SB’s revenue comes from lawsuits and dispute resolution matters. Another 30% comes from “transactional matters,” such as helping businesses create custom contracts, buying or selling a business, HR matters and more. The remaining 20% comes from Internet-related sales.

The second fact is that a lawsuit can cost a business anywhere from $10k to $100k in legal fees. For example, lawsuits between partners can easily cost $50k or more, and if not resolved quickly, often spells disaster for the business.

The third fact is that when a partnership dispute erupts or a LLC is sued, a well-written Operating Agreement really helps us resolve the problem, protect assets or otherwise greatly reduce the legal fees necessary to deal with such legal matters.

In short, a well-written Operating Agreement is a form of insurance for a LLC: To help maximize asset protection, minimize the costs associated with partnership disputes and more.