Harwell Wells, Temple University James E. Beasley School of Law, has posted The Unexpected Origins of the US Limited Liability Partnershi:
This paper tells the origins of the Limited Liability Partnership (LLP) in the United States. Its origins are seemingly well-known; the LLP was created as a response to staggering malpractice claims arising in the 1980s that pushed partners in large American law firms, almost all organised as general partnerships, to seek a shield from personal liability for their firms' or fellow partners' debts. But that account is incomplete. The LLP's origins lie at the end of a much longer story, that of American lawyers' stiff resistance to corporations practicing law. Since the beginning of the twentieth century the legal profession had labored to protect lawyers' self-image and fend off competition by (among other things) forbidding corporations from offering legal services; the LLP appeared when lawyers decided that, despite this longstanding opposition, they needed one of the advantages of incorporation: limited liability. The LLP was thus the product not only of economic demands, but of the peculiarities of the American legal profession and its conflicted relationship with the corporate form and the modern corporation.
--Dan Ernst
