Most founders form the LLC before thinking about the estate plan. That's the wrong order more often than it's the right one. The operating agreement, the membership structure, and the transfer restrictions are decisions the estate plan has opinions about, and reverse-engineering them after the fact is slower, more expensive, and more error-prone than getting them right the first time.

We see the cost most often in two scenarios. In the first, a founder forms a single-member LLC, assigns the interest to a revocable trust years later, and discovers the operating agreement doesn't permit the assignment or doesn't recognize the trustee as having signing authority. In the second, a founder forms a multi-member LLC with co-founders and no buy-sell provision, one of the members dies or divorces, and the survivors inherit a spouse, ex-spouse, or adult child they never agreed to do business with. Both situations are fixable. Neither had to happen.

The right question isn't "LLC first or estate plan first." It's whether the decisions the two documents make about the same subjects are being made in coordination or in sequence. When they're coordinated, the estate plan knows what the OA says and the OA knows what the trust expects. When they're not, the documents contradict each other on exactly the questions that matter most, and someone is paying to reconcile them later.

The Three Timing Patterns

Founders typically land in one of three scenarios when they come to us.

The entity-first pattern is the most common. The founder formed an LLC (often through a filing service, often years ago), has operated under it, and eventually develops a need for estate planning, usually triggered by a marriage, a child, a property purchase, or a conversation with an accountant. By the time they come to us, the LLC exists and has a history: contracts signed, tax returns filed, bank accounts opened, sometimes co-owners added. The estate plan has to work around or amend whatever the LLC's current structure is.