Legal Structures

Struggling to work out which legal structure is right for your project?

Here at United Diversity we’re big fans of Limited Liability Partnerships and Cooperative/ Community Benefit Societies (aka Industrial Provident Societies) but these may not be the best fit for what you want to do.

The best introductory documents to read to get your head around all the options are:

• Simply_Legal.pdf from Co-operatives UK
• Keeping_it_Legal.pdf (first edition, second edition can be purchased here) from the Social Enterprise Coalition
• Cultivating_Cooperatives.pdf from the Soil Association
• Co-operatives UK’s Select-a-Structure tool is pretty useful too

More on Limited Liability Partnerships:

• LLPs.pdf Limited Liability Partnerships, by Brenda Hannigan, Professor of Corporate Law, University of Southampton.

More on Industrial Provident Societies:

• Community-Investment-guide.pdf Using Industrial and Provident Society Legislation by Jim Brown for Co-ops UK
• Community_Shares_Practitioners_Guide.pdf by Jim Brown for Community Shares
• Investing_in_community_shares.pdf by Jim Brown for Community Shares
• Somerset_Rules-Multistakeholder_IPS_Model_rules.pdf – our favourite set of rules, by Alex Lawrie of Somerset Co-operative Services