Source: http://uberlaw.net/tag/llcs/
Timestamp: 2018-01-18 11:19:14
Document Index: 715244630

Matched Legal Cases: ['§ 6', '§ 18', '§ 7', '§ 18', '§18', '§ 18', '§ 14', '§ 14', '§ 14']

LLCs « Unincorporated Business Entities Law
Posts Tagged ‘LLCs’
Delaware, Charging Orders and SMLLCs
House Bill No. 126, introduced in the Delaware legislature on May 9, 2013, would make two amendments to the Delaware LLC Act that would affect the rights of creditors. First, Section 6 of the Bill would Section 18-703(d) of the Delaware LLC Act to read as follows:
(d) The entry of a charging order is the exclusive remedy by which a judgment creditor of a member or a member’s assignee may satisfy a judgment out of the judgment debtor’s limited liability company interest and attachment, garnishment, foreclosure or other legal or equitable remedies are not available to the judgment creditor, whether the limited liability company has 1 member or more than 1 member.
House Bill No. 126, 147th Leg., § 6 (Del. May 9, 2012)(underlining in original, italics added). Second, Section 7 of the Bill would amend § 18-1101 of the Delaware LLC Act by inserting a new sub-paragraph (j), to read :
(j) The provisions of this chapter shall apply whether a limited liability company has 1 member or more than 1 member.
Id. at § 7 (underlining in original).
The first part of the amendment to § 18-703(d) elaborates on what “exclusive remedy” means. Among other things, it seems intened to avoid the result in cases such as would avoid the result, in cases such as Hotel 71 Mezz. Lender LLC v. Falor, 2010 NY Slip Op 01348, 14 NY3d at 307, 926 N.E.2d 1202 (2010) (slip Op.) and Olmstead v. Federal Trade Commission, 44 So. 3d 76 (Fla. 2010)(slip Op.), in which courts held that general creditors remedies, such as attachment (Falor) and levy and execution (Olmstead), can be used to reach interests in LLCs.
The second part of the amendment to §18-703(d), and new 18-1101(j) is aimed at the result, in cases such as Olmstead, and In re Albright, 291 B.R. 538 (Bankr. D. Colo. 2003), that allow a transferee of the interest of the sole member in a single-member LLC (SMLLC) to succeed to both the economic and the management rights of the member. With the SMLLC amendments, Delaware joins the race-to-the-bottom for the state most-friendly to the use of SMLLCs for asset p;rotection.
Tags:charging orders, Delaware, LLCs, SMLLCs
Posted in Delaware, Legislation & Regulations, LLCs, Ownership Interests in UBEs, Statutes, Uncategorized | No Comments »
In its per curiam opinion in Gatz Properties, LLC v. Auriga Capital Corporation, 59 A.3d 1223 (Del. 2012)(en banc) (slip opinion), the Delaware Supreme Court called on the Delaware legislature to settle the questions of whether, when the LLC agreement is silent, those involved with LLCs owe fiduciary duties. See Gary Rosin, Gatz Properties, LLC. v. Auriga Capital Corp. (Del. 2012): Strine Affirmed on other Grounds and Chastised (Nov. 8, 2012).
Proposed legislation has been working its way through the Delaware State Bar Association. On May 9, 2012, the result, House Bill No. 126, was introduced in current Delaware legislative session. Section 8 of the bill provides:
Section 8. Amend § 18-1104, Title 6 of the Delaware Code by making insertions as shown by underlining as follows:
In any case not provided for in this chapter, the rules of law and equity, including the rules of law and equity relating to fiduciary duties and the law merchant, shall govern.
As noted by Doug Batey, Uncertainty Over Delaware LLC Fiduciary Duties To Be Clarified (April 16, 2013), the bill implicitly endorses the reasoning of Chancellor Stine in Auriga Capital Corp. v. Gatz Properties, LLC, 40 A.3d 839 (Del. Ch. 2012) (slip op.) that fiduciary duties are rooted in equity.
As a side note, in his opinion in Feeley v. NHAOCG, LLC, C.A. No. 7304-VCL (Nov. 28, 2012)(slip op.), Vice Chancellor Laster noted that , in Gatz Properties, LLC, the Delaware Supreme Court had left open the question of default fiduciary duties, and had Chancellor for even discussing the question. Laster then treated Strine’s opinion as if it were a law review article, slip op, at 16-17, and adopted Strine’s reasoning. Feeley , slip op. at 14-22. Laster’s opinion also has a nice discussion of the introductory phrase to Del. Sec. 18-1101(c), which allows contracting out of fiduciary duties:
To the extent that, at law or in equity, a member or manager or other person has duties (including fiduciary duties),
As explained by the Vice Chancellor, whether a member, or some other person, owes fiduciary duties is context specific. For example, in a manager-managed LLC, a non-controlling member does not owe fiduciary duties. Likewise, a person who is not a manager or a member might assume fiduciary duties by becoming and office or agent of the LLC. Feeley, slip op. at 18-21.
Tags:default fiduciary duties, Delaware, LLCs
Posted in Delaware, Fiduciary Duties, Legislation & Regulations, LLCs, Statutes | No Comments »
Manesh on Dictum & Default Duties
Mohsen Manesh (Oreg.) has a working paper with the alliterative title Damning Dictum: The Default Duty Debate in Delaware” (February 21, 2013)(SSRN). The paper reacts to the Delaware Supreme Court’s opinion in Gatz Properties, LLC. v. Auriga Capital Corp., C.A. 4390 (Del. Nov. 7, 2012)(per curiam), aff’g on other grounds, Auriga Capital Corp. v. Gatz Properties, LLC, 40 A.3d 839 (Del. Ch. 2012) (slip opinion). As discussed in Gatz Properties, LLC. v. Auriga Capital Corp. (Del. 2012): Strine Affirmed on other Grounds and Chastised, in his opinion below, Chancellor Strine had outlined the basis for applying default fiduciary duties to persons managing Delaware LLCs, and the Delaware Supreme Court rebuked him for doing so.
Prof. Manesh criticizes the Delaware Supreme Court’s opinion in Gatz Properties, LLC on several grounds. Two of the most important are:
The Court needlessly unsettled expectations that default fiduciary duties apply, except where modified or eliminated by agreement.
Not only have both the Delaware Chancery and Supreme courts long used dicta to guide the development of the law, that practice is central to the pre-eminence of those courts, and of Delaware generally, in the law of business organizations.
Tags:default fiduciary duties, Gatz Properties LLC, LLCs
Posted in Cases, Commentary, Delaware, Fiduciary Duties, LLCs, Scholarship, Uncategorized | No Comments »
Ethics and Ellipsis. Ly v. Jimmy Carter Commons, LLC (Ga. 2010)
Probably, every lawyer has used an ellipsis to show that a portion of the text was left out of a quotation. But what are the ethics of elision and inclusion?
Consider, if you will, the opinion in Ly v. Jimmy Carter Commons, LLC, 286 Ga. 831, 691 S.E.2d 852 (2010). A manager of an LLC (Byun) purported to borrow money on behalf of the LLC in connection with a real estate development. As part of the closing documents, the manager gave the lender a purported “Unanimous Consent of the Manager and Members” that authorized the manager to borrow the money, sign the promissory note, and the mortgage on the LLC’s land to secure payment of the note. As it turned out, one of the signatures was forged. When the LLC defaulted on the note, the LLC sued the lender to enjoin foreclosure, and to void the note and mortgage, on the grounds that the manager lacked the authority to borrow the money, or to sign the note and the mortgage. The trial court granted summary judgment in favor of the LLC. The Georgia Supreme Court reversed, holding that there was a question of fact.
What is interesting about the opinion is not the result; rather it is the reasoning of the opinion, and the way the opinion used the Georgia LLC statute.
* * * … there is still a genuine issue of material fact as to whether Appellants had knowledge that the unanimous consent documents were ineffective and did not give Byun the authority to act alone on behalf of Jimmy Carter Commons.
[T]he act of any manager [of a limited liability company] … binds the limited liability company, unless the manager so acting has, in fact, no authority to act for the limited liability company in the particular matter, and the person with whom he or she is dealing has knowledge of the fact that the manager has no such authority. (Emphasis supplied.)
OCGA § 14-11-301(b)(2). Thus, “[n]o act of a manager … in contravention of a restriction on authority shall bind the limited liability company to persons having knowledge of the restriction.” OCGA § 14-11-301(d).
Consequently, even if Byun acted beyond his authority as a manager of Jimmy Carter Commons, the limited liability company may still be bound by his actions if Appellants did not know that he lacked such authority. In its summary judgment order, the trial court did not cite, and Jimmy Carter Commons has not identified, undisputed evidence showing that Appellants knew that Choi’s signatures on the consent documents were forged. * * *
691 S.E.2d at 853.
Here is the complete text of Section 14-11-301:
§ 14-11-301. Powers, duties, and authority of members and managers
Any partnership lawyer will recognize subsections (a), (b)(2), and (d) as taken from section 9 of the Uniform Partnership Act, and adapted for member-managed and manager-managed LLCs. Any partnership lawyer will also recognize the centrality of the language omitted by the court, especially the portion in bold italics. As written, Section 14-11-301 conditions a manager’s power to bind the LLC by an unauthorized act to acts “apparently carrying on the the usual way the business and affairs of the LLC.” As subsection (c) makes clear, unauthorized acts that are not apparently carrying on in the usual way the business and affairs of the LLC do not bind the LLC. The result of the misquotation–the ellipsis–is a radical expansion of the apparent authority of LLC’s manager: not just usual acts, but any act, without regard to its nature.
This seems to me to be a particularly pernicious use of the ellipsis; one that changes the character of the quotation. Even non-lawyers recognize that intentionally omitting important information is unethical. Thanks to Seinfeld, we even have an expression that describes an elision made in bad faith: “yada, yada.”
The question here is whether the justices on the Court knew that a key part of the statute had been dropped out. One might attribute the misquotation to the not-uncommon phenomenon of unfamiliarity with agency principles, and unincorporated business entity law, or, instead, to an overcrowded docket. Still, it is hard to imagine that none of the justices read Section 14-11-301 closely, or that, on close reading, none noticed its limits on apparent authority.
That said, the result–overturning the summary judgment–is probably correct. Whether borrowing money is apparently carrying on in the usual way the LLC’s business is a question of fact that turns on the nature of the LLC’s business. Jimmy Carter Commons, LLC seems to have been a real estate development 0company. Such companies are more likely to be customary frequent borrowers than, say, a company selling advertising slots on a border radio station. See, Burns v. Gonzalez, 439 S.W.2d 128 (Tex Civ. App. 1969).
But, as I suggested in my earlier post, Conflating Tests for Agents and Servants, there is no such thing as a “harmless” misstatement of the law by a court. Given that the misstatement here is by the Georgia Supreme Court, only a later opinion of that court can put Georgia law back on the right course.
Tags:apparent authority, LLCs
Posted in Agency, Cases, Commentary, LLCs, Professional Responsibility, Statutes | No Comments »