Are you protected? Why Everyone Needs A Lawyer.

As it’s the day after Labor Day, after which the town (typically) swings back to action, I thought this would be a good opportunity to talk about why everyone — even managers and producers — need a lawyer.

Now I know this might sound shocking, but not everyone in this town wants to play nice. Especially these days, the sole goal of buyers is to get the most they can out of a project/writer or producer and pay as little as possible.  In fact, buyers are using the current economic situation to take a very hard stance against paying what was once customary fees and they are getting to pay next to nothing.

This is why you must have a good lawyer to represent you.  Let your lawyer be the bad guy, let him/her fight back for you, so you can remain neutral and just work on the creative side of the project while your lawyer fights it out with the buyer.

In fact, this just happened to me.

As a manager, I work every day with an agent and a lawyer on deals for my clients, fighting the good fight on behalf of my clients.  But recently I was negotiating a feature deal for a project we are producing when I realized the buyer was taking an incredibly hard stance.  I needed to stay on the creative side and remain on good terms with the executive on the project.

Thus I got my fabulous lawyers involved and let them fight it out with the buyer. This way I was able to stay friendly with the executive while our lawyers duked it out.

And once we had reached an acceptable compromise where everyone was more or less happy, we were able to move smoothly forward to working on the project since there was no bad blood between us.

IMPORTANT NOTE: While there are a lot of great lawyers, there are some shady ones as well.  So make sure you are hiring a lawyer who has a good reputation and will fight for you. Never be afraid to ask for references! And if you need some references, just email me and I will be happy to provide some.