Editorial and Sourcing Policy

Growing Partners writes about forming, running, and ending business partnerships: the agreement, the equity split, the disputes, and the exit. Every guide starts from primary sources, not from what other sites already say about the subject.

A figure, a deadline, or a rule on this site traces to one of a small set of sources: the Uniform Partnership Act (1997) and the Uniform Limited Liability Company Act, as published by the Uniform Law Commission; the Internal Revenue Code and the IRS's own instructions and forms (Form 1065, Schedule K-1, Form 15620); the Small Business Administration's lending rules; state statutes, read from each state's own legislature site; and published court opinions, cited by name and year (Connelly v. United States, decided in 2024, is the one these guides lean on most for buy-sell agreements funded by life insurance). Where a fact could not be checked against a source like that, it is left out rather than guessed at.

State filing fees, tax figures, and agency rules change, sometimes with little notice. A figure here that can move is marked "as of" a date, and the state by state tables (filing fees, non compete law, judicial dissolution grounds) are checked again on a schedule rather than written once and left standing. A number that is wrong because the law changed after we last checked is a correction we owe you, not the kind of error this policy is meant to prevent: something nobody checked in the first place.

Growing Partners is an independent site, and its pages carry one byline, the Growing Partners editors, rather than the names of individual writers. Each page is researched and drafted with the help of AI tools. The research reads the primary sources first, and every page lists the sources it was written from at its foot. Figures, deadlines and statute numbers are taken from those sources and dated where they can change; anything that could not be traced to a source is cut rather than estimated. The state tables were compiled the same way, row by row, with the statute or official page and the date it was checked on each row.

A page that is revised after publishing shows the revision date beside the original one. Pages that turned out to overlap, or that no longer met this policy, have been merged into the stronger page on the subject or taken down, with the old address forwarding to the page that replaced it.

Nothing on this site is legal advice, and no page here has been reviewed by an attorney before publishing. These are guides to the general rule and where it comes from, written for an owner who wants to understand a question before taking it to a lawyer licensed in their own state, since partnership and LLC law varies by state and the partners' own agreement can override the default rule anyway.

Contact us if a fact here looks wrong or out of date. We read every message that comes in and fix what needs fixing.