The emerging manager fund formation checklist

The terms to decide before they get drafted

Fund counsel drafts the LPA from the terms a GP has already settled, not the other way around. Deciding these early, and holding them steady, is what keeps every later document consistent with every other one.

• Management fee, carry, and whether a hurdle applies.
• Preferred return and recycling provisions.
• The key-man clause and extension provisions.
• GP commitment amount, its source, and the funding timeline. A commitment funded by a management company loan needs to be disclosed as such, explicitly, rather than presented as a straightforward cash commitment.

What gets assembled alongside the legal work

These are documents a GP can build directly, in parallel with counsel's drafting rather than waiting on it.

• A one-page fund summary that leads with thesis and edge, not biography.
• A key terms sheet, formatted to cover the fee, term, governance, and reporting topics institutional LPs expect to find there.
• A fund pitch deck covering economics, pipeline, reserves policy, and governance.
• A contact matrix naming the IR lead, operations, and legal contacts, with current emails.

Internal consistency across these four is worth checking before anything goes to an LP. A number that does not match between the one-pager and the key terms sheet gets read as a governance question, not an arithmetic error, regardless of which document happens to be correct.

Where this checklist stops, and counsel starts

Domicile choice, entity structure, the LPA itself, the subscription agreement, and side letters are fund counsel's documents. Blueprint does not draft them and this checklist does not attempt to replace that work. What belongs on a checklist is engaging counsel, a fund administrator, and an auditor early enough that the terms above are settled by the time drafting starts, not renegotiated mid-formation because a decision got made too late to feed into the documents already in progress.