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.

Another thing I ran into during all of this was that a lot of the nice-looking legal templates online are made for the US, not Canada, so they don’t always apply.