A business form that shields its owners from most business debts while staying simpler to run than a corporation.
An LLC is a business entity created by filing with a state. Its central feature is in the name: the owners, called members, are generally not personally liable for the company's debts, so a creditor of the business ordinarily reaches the business's assets rather than the members' homes and savings.
The protection is real but conditional, and the condition is the part most often missed. It depends on the LLC actually being operated as a separate entity - separate bank accounts, records kept, formalities observed, and the company adequately funded for what it does. Where an owner treats the company as a personal account, a court may disregard the separation entirely. Nor does the shield cover a member's own wrongdoing, or a debt the member personally guaranteed, which is what most lenders to a small LLC will require.
Federal tax treatment is separate from liability and is largely elective: an LLC is not a tax category of its own, and the same entity can be taxed in more than one way depending on what is elected and how many members it has.
The two things worth advice are the operating agreement and the separation discipline. Default state rules apply to anything the agreement does not address, and those defaults frequently do not match what co-owners assumed about control, profit splits or what happens when someone wants out - which is discovered at the worst moment. Forming the entity is the easy part and is not where the risk is.
These directory pages each list at least one currently published law firm. The list is generated when this page loads, so a page whose listings have lapsed drops out rather than becoming a dead link.