I'm producing an independent documentary film, with an estimated production budget of $225,000. Need to prepare and sign agreements with an investor, and with the director, cinematographer, composer, and distributor. Can anyone with substantial experience in this area of the law give me a general range for what the legal fees typically are for doing such documents for an indie film? I need a number to put into the budget.
It is hard to give an estimate as one cannot predict how much the other side of each agreement will negotiate the terms. You are asking about at least five agreements most of which will have very different terms from each other. If there is not much negotiation and the parties accept the drafted agreements pretty much as is, then I would budget between $2500-$5,000 as most experienced lawyers can use prior documents and don't need to start from scratch. If there are significant issues to work out with each party and the negotiations get lengthy, then $5,000 to $10,000. But your best bet if you want to budget is to call some lawyers you may want to use and get a price quote from them.
Production counsel as an attorney is usually done as a percentage of the budget. 1.5-2.5% is considered a normal range but can vary. Consult with an entertainment attorney, do a search on .com.
The challenges here are not insignificant. I like to break down my fees into three components, Financing, Production and Distribution.
Your agreements with the director, cinematographer and composer, as well as the form of release for the subjects of your film, location agreements, other music licenses, TM and copyright clearances, third party licenses, any narrator and the like all are part of the production work.
the Investors or Investor fall under financing.
And the Distribution agreement falls under distribution. It gets fuzzy if the distributor, say HBO, is agreeing to pay you a certain amount on delivery of the picture, and you use that contract as collateral for a loan to pay the costs of production.
Also, depending on where you shoot, and where you do post production, you should be mindful of state tax credits which vary from 15% to 40% of a film's budget, and which can reduce your actual costs.
while a 2% figure for production costs is normal, the other matters, in particular financing, as well as tax credits, on a relatively low budget film like this, make it hard to quote properly.
On the financing side, good lawyers will advise you to form an LLC to own the copyright, which will protect you as the producer, the director, the editor and everyone else from personal liability. that costs money, and the LLC operating agreement with the other investor(s) takes time to consider.
the distribution agreement can be simple, if there is but one territory, or one medium, or complex if it covers multiple territories, windows, rights to subdistribute and the like. Its not an easy quote.
Its important that you think hard about where you will shoot and where you will do post, so you can take advantage of the tax credits. You definitely should hook up with a lawyer who wants a relationship with you, and who can work on the next picture too.
If you're going to start an LLC to act through, I would estimate about $6500-$7000. If you're going to sign personally, I would estimate around $5000-$5500.
My estimate coming in here was about $5,000, based on the brief info you've provided, and that seems to be within the consensus so far. It depends on the hourly rate of the attorney and how well developed the relationships already are. A lot of back-and-forth negotiation will naturally take more time and cost the client more money, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does invoke a cost/benefit analysis. Feel free to contact me for more info, and best of luck! I love documentaries.
All the lawyers above have already given great answers that I agree with and you are lucky to have a large pool of knowledge to sift through. I will only add two things:
1) Whatever number you end up putting in your budget should be on the high side i.e. $6000+. Reason being that while your negotiations and agreements can be simple and straightforward and not cost much, you never know until you're in the thick of it. And so, it's best to prepare for that possibility and have enough money to address it. In the end, it's better to have an extra $1000 or 2 that you can use in some other area of your documentary then to have to scramble and subtract a $1000 or 2 or more from your documentary to cover legal costs.
2) While a low fee should not be the only reason why you choose to go with a particular attorney, you should still discuss your budget and project with multiple attorneys before settling on one; it's possible that you can find an attorney willing to work for you at a lower fee based on his or her interest in your project. Personally, I have done work for clients at lower prices because I believe in their work and understand the indie filmmaker's dilemma. Unless you need a number tonight, it doesn't hurt to take an hour and talk with a few attorneys.
$5-6000. Less if the parties already have a pretty firm understanding of what they're agreeing to. Usually an experienced lawyer can make these things more cost-effective by using off-the-shelf contracts. Where things get complicated, is the parties turn out to not have agreed on as much as they think they have.
