Legal Question in Business Law in New Jersey

In my experience, business setup services offer very little value to the new business owners. If you know that you want to set up an LLC and have the legal and tax background to understand your options, you can use the NJ online site directly for a single member LLC. If your company will have multiple owners or if you need legal advice, then you should engage the services of a NJ business lawyer. I tested the most popular LLC setup service with one of my clients promising the client that I would correct or complete anything that the service did that I found lacking. (I did that so that I could advise my business law students on whether the service added value.) I found that the service did an adequate job of drafting an operating agreement although it left out some sections that I consider important to the long term success of a company and offered only a very simplistic approach to owner compensation. Since the ability to adjust compensation models is an important strength of the LLC structure, I consider this a major deficiency. The service was unnecessarily expensive in preparing the SS-4 to obtain a federal tax ID which can be done faster an absolutely free on irs.gov. Much of the dialog was oriented to selling the user additional services that were not needed. If the user followed all of the recommendations of the service for add-ons, he would have paid as much as I charge for a setup with legal advice included and better operating documents. As a bonus, when I do an online setup, the client gets all of the documents before he or she leaves my office. So, my opinion is that these services don't offer much value.

See also: http://info.corbettlaw.net/lawguru.htm

Absolutely! There are free forms online. Are you going to do it right?

Remember, what you really want is a good tax and business attorney to guide you concerning the best entity and location for the entity. You also need good, ongoing tax and legal advice. You need to set-up your business right at the start.

Good luck!

Ron Cappuccio

Setting up the company is easy. A good lawyer and a good accountant are what you need.