In Ukraine, entrepreneurship started forming in the absence of the previous experience of its legal regulation in connection with the long socialist period. The relationship between individuals and organisations that have merged in one corporation needs special regulation, and one of the means by which it became possible to regulate relations on the creation and operation of corporations, is the construction of a legal entity. Therefore, the main purpose of the work is to identify the legal form of the activities of legal entities of a corporate type. The analysis of the norms of the current legislation, which contain the term “legal form”, shows the ambiguity of its application in the context of different legal norms It is well-known that the content of corporate legal relationships includes not only corporate rights, but also the corresponding corporate responsibilities of company’s member. It is established that the current civil law of Ukraine does not provide normative definition of a legal form of legal entities, does not establish the criteria for its formation. On the basis of a retrospective analysis of normative legal acts, the transformation of the legal approach to the definition of the legal nature of corporate rights has been analysed – from the determination of the nature as the nature of absolute substantive law to the definition of it as a symbiosis of property and non-property rights caused by the ownership of a share in the authorised capital of a legal entity of a corporate type. It has been found out that the economic code of Ukraine fixed the main forms within which economic entities (collective-ownership enterprises, economic companies, private enterprises, farming, foreign enterprise, etc.) operated. The classification of legal forms of legal entities, which are grouped according to the relevant criteria, has been carried out. But the criterion for the delineation and classification of a certain range of legal forms of legal entities is the legal regime of property of a legal entity established in one or another legal form.