Advice on finding someone to do contracts to film your series (low budget series).

This is something I would 100% recommend doing, but it wasn’t as straightforward as I thought it would be.

When we first started looking into lawyers who handle film industry contracts, we realized there are only a small number who actually do this kind of work. I figured I would just make a short list, call around for quotes, and pick one. That was the plan.

It didn’t go that way.

A lot of them didn’t call us back at all. I’m pretty persistent though, so I just kept calling until I finally got through. At one point, I even ended up talking to a higher profile lawyer on his lunch break.

What I found pretty quickly was that, no matter the size of the production or the level of risk, the cost for basic contracts was going to be somewhere between $1500 and $3000. That just wasn’t realistic for us with such a small budget, but we still felt strongly that we needed to have proper contracts in place.

Eventually, I connected with a local lawyer who called me back and was willing to give some advice upfront, which really helped. They were able to provide contracts at a much lower cost, and the quality was still solid.

One thing we learned during that meeting was that a lawyer can’t represent two separate people or groups working on the same project. If something goes wrong, they can’t represent both sides. So without a lot of people doing this type of contact, in Edmonton, the list becomes very short.

We were tempted to use an online resource. But a lot of the nice-looking legal templates online are made for the US, not Canada, so they don’t always apply. In the end its better to budget in someone local, ask around and hopefully you will find the perfect contact for yourself and others.