The Couture Shareholder Agreement and Bylaws

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 Shareholder Agreement and Bylaws.

We wrote a very sophisticated document assembly system — an expert system — to help generate your Shareholder Agreement and Bylaws. These documents:

• Take into account the very latest legal requirements and tax code
• Permit significant customizations (over 100)
• Possess granular and sophisticated options for voting, powers and control
• Have serious capabilities around dissociation and valuation
• Come with customized How-To Guides regarding voting and tax issues
• And much, much more

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

Now, the Couture Shareholder Agreement and Bylaws provides the best of both worlds: A low-cost, high-quality, highly customized Shareholder Agreement and Bylaws. Only available from L4SB.

Our system has three components:

The first component asks basic questions about your corporation (i.e. the name, address, tax status, and a list of shareholders, directors, officers, 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 Shareholder Agreement and Bylaws meet all your needs.

The documents that are generated by this third component include:

• An Instructional Overview — that explains next steps and recommended tasks.
• The Shareholder Agreement and Bylaws themselves
• A stock ledger with a list of all shareholders and the classes and types of shares they hold
• A list of Intellectual Property (IP) being specially contributed by the shareholders (if needed)
• A How-To Guide regarding Voting
• A How-To Guide regarding Taxes
• A Corporate Resolution Template
• A Spousal Consent Template (if appropriate)
• Shareholder and Director Resolutions

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 corporations 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 shareholder dispute erupts or a corporation is sued, a well-written Shareholder Agreement and set of Bylaws 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 Shareholder Agreement and set of Bylaws is a form of insurance for corporations: to help maximize asset protection, minimize the costs associated with shareholder disputes, and more.