If only this case had existed a couple of years ago

In 2022, I published an article about discrimination against women capital providers.  The thesis was that oppression and discrimination against women as investors is an unrecognized category; employment law, of course, recognizes discrimination against women employees, and family law recognizes that women may be financially disadvantaged within relationships and tries to make allowances for that.   But business law does not have a vocabulary to recognize how invidious discrimination and interpersonal dynamics may work against women, and that’s a problem, in part because business law is often called upon to fill in the gaps in situations that employment and family law don’t cover.

In my article, one of the examples I used was Horne v. Aune, 121 P.3d 1227 (Wash. Ct. App. 2005), in which a man and a woman – in a romantic relationship – bought a house together.  They intended merely to live in the house, but they formalized their ownership in a partnership agreement.  When the relationship terminated – because the man was charged criminally after shoving the woman and assaulting her son – the court relied on general partnership principles to determine how to dispose of the property, without considering the broader context of the relationship.

Anyway, that was what I was thinking about when I read Gibson v. Konick, recently decided by VC Will in Delaware Chancery.   A man and a woman decided to purchase a house together for their personal use.  They did so through an LLC, in which they each had 50% interest.  Both contributed to the purchase price, and both were required to pay down the mortgage.  The relationship eventually soured, leaving it to LLC law to determine how their joint property would be handled.

If this really were a pure LLC business relationship, I’d shrug, but that wasn’t the situation – this was a romantic relationship being filtered through an LLC, and there were implications of the kind of power imbalances that employment law and family law recognize, but business law does not.  In this case, the man was 29 years older than the woman, and an attorney.  He drafted the LLC agreement, which he represented to her as “standard,” but which in fact contained terms that disadvantaged her, including a waiver of inspection rights, a waiver of the woman’s right to participate in LLC management, and a forfeiture of her economic rights if she withdrew from the LLC or attempted to transfer her interest.

All of this meant that when the relationship ended, the man was able to: (1) deny the woman any access to the property and the LLC joint bank account; (2) insist that she not sell her interest; (3) refuse to buy her interest, but (4) require that she continue to make her share of the payments on the mortgage.  The man refused to take her calls, and when she attempted to visit him to discuss the property, he insisted she was trespassing, making any communication or negotiation impossible.   As VC Will put it, the woman had “been deprived of the upside while she continues to pay costs, with no guarantee of recovering them.”

The woman ultimately sued for judicial dissolution under 6 Del. C. § 18-802.  That statute permits dissolution “whenever it is not reasonably practicable to carry on the business in conformity with a limited liability company agreement.”

Of course, there was no actual business being conducted by this LLC – that was the whole point – so instead VC Will concluded that the “purpose of enjoying the home over the long-term” had been “frustrated” by the couple’s breakup, and the deadlock between the two members meant that it was “no longer reasonably practicable to maintain the LLC.”  Therefore, dissolution was warranted, notwithstanding the fact that the LLC agreement would have required a unanimous vote of the membership to dissolve.

That certainly seems like a fair resolution to me, but, my point is, it also reflects the awkwardness of trying to shoehorn what was fundamentally a family dispute into laws designed for business relationships.  There really should be a better framework.