Shareholder / Partner Agreement

Shareholder / Partner Agreement Framework Built on a Standard Operating Procedure Approach

Our Shareholder / Partner Agreement is built on a Standard Operating Procedure (“SOP”) framework. It is designed to allow the partner group to vote on changes to various policies as soon as they become outdated, so that they properly reflect the current approach of the group. As well, new policies can be added the same way. This allows the partner agreement to be updated continuously, always reflecting the current thinking of the firm.

Prior to our putting these drafts and supporting video in place, going through the agreement development process from scratch each time with firms would easily cost them well in excess of $30,000 or more. This package allows firms to develop their partner agreement at a fraction of that cost. Please contact us to access to the benefits of this package.

Benefits of using this package include:

Access to the draft SOP Agreement documents
Access to a two-hour video discussing each policy from a general standpoint, why we created it and some of the common modifications or issues related to it
One hour of free consulting with our attorney who helped develop these draft documents

Sample Agreement Templates

This package contains a variety of downloadable proprietary sample business policies (by way of a limited use license granted to your firm) in an SOP format for LLC, LLP & PC for your review, created, vetted and approved by our attorneys. These templates cover, for example:

Buy-sell valuation
Retirement-related Issues
Transition of clients
Termination of a partner leaving to compete against the firm
Partner withdrawing from the firm but not competing against the firm
Roles and responsibilities for the board, managing partner, line partners
Electing or dismissing the managing partner
Dealing with partial and total disability and death
And, much more!

Some things to keep in mind as you go through the policy documents:

The documents are intended to be separate documents, providing the modularity to allow for a change to be made to one part without having to go through potentially a complete re-write of everything.
These documents are templates, created by our attorney in Austin, based on our suggestions from working with CPA firms, to be modified to fit your firm’s needs. For example, you’ll see some roles and responsibilities for an executive committee, which most smaller firms can ignore because they have no need for an executive committee.
Be sure to examine the voting thresholds as you review the documents.

Consulting Included

One hour of legal assistance from our attorney to talk with about customization issues is available for up to a year from the date you purchase the package.

Steps:

Download the appropriate policy package .zip file for your firm (provided upon purchase).
Print the documents included in the .zip file
View this video, Pulling It All Together with a Partner-Shareholder Agreement, for an overview of the process of developing what we call an SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) framework around your owners’ agreement.
Take notes as you watch the video and review the documents:
- As we discuss each policy in the video, you might stop the video when we first mention it, find the policy we are talking about, take a quick read of it, and then start the video and make notes on the pages for any questions you have or any changes you are thinking about making.
- Then, after going through all of the polices, put all of those questions on a page and call us and we will use the free hour to get as many questions answered as possible, and if you want more time, no problem, we will just charge it against the retainer time.
- The key is to make note of anything that didn’t make sense to you, anything you think is too harsh, and anything you don’t think is harsh enough.
Talk to us
- When we can talk, we can explain why we created the drafts like we did, but we can also share with you what charges other firms commonly make to these draft agreements.
- We look forward to hearing from you after you have had a chance to digest these policies and listen to our commentary regarding them in our video.
Update the policies
- You will want to update the top of each policy with a date you hope to have the partner/shareholder agreement ready to sign, and then pick a date for each policy to be reviewed at some time in the future, we usually recommend a year to 18 months later.
- You want to rotate the dates so that, lets say a year or two from now, each quarter, 3 or 4 policies come up for review and someone in your firm will be designated to take a look at those policies and make suggestions to the owner group if any changes should be made.
- This approach drives your policies to always be updated and to reflect the current thinking and actions of the owner group.
Talk to your attorney
- Once you have made the edits you want to make to the draft documents, the next step is to run the policies by your attorney.
- You have to decide what makes sense for you and run it by someone to verify what to do to make sure it is drafted correctly so that it is legal in your state.
- To provide you with some legal assistance, you do get a free hour with our attorney to discuss the policies too. He can even draft the agreement for you if you want. But most people want to use their local attorney.
- One of the main reasons we have our attorney available to you is to talk to your attorney.
  - Most attorneys want to take our SOP agreement and string all of the policies together into a document and call it a partner/shareholder agreement.
  - By keeping it structured the way we are suggesting, with a short agreement that incorporates all of the separate policies, as well as your updates to them in the future, additional polices, etc. into the partner/shareholder agreement with nothing more than an owner vote at one of your board meetings, this approach allows you to keep your partner/shareholder agreement current, flexible and dynamic.
  - If you tie them all up in one agreement, changing any policy becomes much more difficult as you will end up most likely engaging your attorneys with every change you want to make and if you are like every firm we know that does that, you will put it off until you have time to go through the entire document to update it since keeping it updated is an added expense.
  - Because of the added time and expense to keep a traditional partner/shareholder agreement current, that is why we run into firms having ridiculously outdated agreements, which don’t reflect how they have been operating for years, or different versions of the agreement of which none of those agreements were signed by all of the owners. And guess what … when you don’t have ONE current agreement, then the firm is at risk because all of the variation of the agreement will be used to justify bad behavior and avoid accountability.
- So, if your attorney starts telling you why this style of agreement won’t work or why it isn’t legal in your state, please have him/her get on the phone with you and our attorney to at least talk through it as well as the pros and cons to help you get to a final resolution.