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Comment by jsiarto | Hacker News Reader

All good points--I don't completely agree on the LegalZoom issue. Our company incorporated in Illinois through LegalZoom and it worked out great. I've done LLC/partnerships on my own and the paperwork is easy. It's good to think of LegalZoom as a paralegal service and not as a lawyer. We had an actual corporate lawyer draft contracts and other important documents but I'm not paying someone $300/hour to fill out forms.

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You incorporated in Illinois?

I don't know Illinois law well, but there are good reasons why most corporations are Delaware (with a few in Nevada and a couple other states), including tax and governance issues. Did you ask an attorney if Illinois was the right state for you?

My understanding is that for S/C-corps you should incorporate in Delaware, for LLCs it's generally better to do it in the state you operate out of.

> I don't know Illinois law well, but there are good reasons why most corporations are Delaware (with a few in Nevada and a couple other states), including tax and governance issues.

CA works really hard to ensure that there are no tax advantages to incorporating elsewhere. If you do biz in CA, you pay CA taxes on that biz (and possibly some other biz - CA wants money).

In fact, CA even has a minimum fee ($5-800 IIRC) for doing biz here even if you don't make money.

By most corporations, I think you mean most large, public corporations incorporate in Deleware. I just didn't want to hassle with being a foreign entity in my own state and the taxes and fees in Illinois are reasonable.

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