The Limited-Liability Partnership and Bankruptcy Lawyers - Essay Example

• Name the state in which the case of the court will be dealt with. The liabilities for the partners involved vary from one state to another depending upon their respective laws. Different courts interpret the very laws differently.
• What was the level of difficulty of the performed surgery? Was the doctor not able to execute the surgery without causing the accident? Or, maybe, was the risk involved in the surgery so high that death was inevitable under all circumstances?

• How popular was this doctor popular among other doctors for his ability to perform this surgery? Did the other doctors have any valid reasons to criticize the surgery as it had been done?
• What does the term “very poor judgment” in the case mean? What was the gravity of the mistake that the doctor made?
Answers to the aforementioned questions matter a lot because they can greatly affect the magnitude of liabilities for other doctors.
Numerous quotes taken from The Wall Street Journal that relate to the problem under consideration are paraphrased below:

Almost 1750 US partners of Andersen are worried that many people who were not involved in the company’s proceedings for the Enron Corp. were also held liable through the spoiled audit. Many of them are seeking legal advice to know the extent to which their limited-liability partnership makes them protected from liabilities.
The limited-liability partnership has not been tested for the sort of challenges that Andersen is now encountering since this corporate structure is relatively new. However, this testing may just be carried out as the workers, shareholders and creditors of Enron are making effort to retrieve their lost hundreds of thousands of dollars from somebody.

The law professor from George Mason University, Larry Ribstein said that the strength of LLP’s protection has been tested for litigation and the number of cases of LLP regarding liability is very low.

The LLP was created almost ten years ago in an attempt to provide protect the members of partnerships against the firms’ tendency to wipe them out because of their claims. The LLP structure makes the partners’ share in the company fair for the creditors. Theoretically, no partner can lose his/her share in the company.
A professor from the University of California Los Angeles law school, Lynn LoPucki said that the conventional practice disallows the removal of the corporate veil to follow individual partners unless special circumstances. However, there is a lot of subjectivity in the law which enables the courts to do as they deem right. According to LoPucki, It all depends upon the case and facts that apply.

Laventhol & Horwath, an accounting company filed a case for the 11th chapter of bankruptcy-court protection in 1990 before the creation of LLP partly because of the lawsuits about questionable accounting. However, the assets of the company were too less to address the claims made by the litigants and the creditors. The creditors of the company negotiated a plan which required 360 former partners of the company that had been part of the company since 1984 to share a liability worth $46 million with the company.