I've been building the budget for this film and legal is the line I kept guessing at.

Every time I got to it I'd put a number in, feel bad about the number, and move on. So I finally went and got real ones.

Here's what I found, split into the part you can do yourself and the part you absolutely should not.

What you can do yourself

There's a whole category of film paperwork where the form is standard and a mistake stays small. You can handle these with a decent template and an afternoon.

Crew deal memos. Location agreements. Appearance releases and personal releases. NDAs.

Forming your LLC, which is a state filing, not a legal event. You fill in a form and pay the state. Depending on where you are it's somewhere between fifty and a few hundred dollars.

Registering the copyright, which you do yourself at the Copyright Office for a filing fee. You do not need a lawyer to upload a PDF.

None of that is glamorous and all of it is doable. If you're working at a scale where every dollar matters, this is where the savings actually live.

What you don't touch

Then there's the other category.

Anything attached to investor money. The minute you're raising from private investors you're in securities law. That's not a figure of speech, it's the actual regulatory regime you've entered. The private placement memorandum that goes with it runs 80 to 120 pages and gets written around your specific budget and structure. It is not a document that exists in template form, because the whole point of it is the particulars of your deal.

People who template that part get sued or get fined. That's the whole warning and I don't think it needs decorating.

Chain of title. Every distributor and every insurer wants an unbroken paper line from the writer to the company that owns the film. Who wrote it, who owns it now, how it got from one to the other, every step documented.

The ugly thing about chain of title is the delay. A gap you leave in year one doesn't hurt in year one. It shows up in year three when somebody is trying to buy the film and their lawyer finds the hole, and now you're tracking down a PA from a shoot three summers ago to sign something you should have had signed then.

I think about this one a lot, because it's the kind of mistake that feels free when you make it.

The actual numbers

Entertainment attorneys run roughly $150 to $500 an hour depending on experience and city. In Los Angeles you're toward the top of that.

Errors and omissions insurance on an independent feature runs about $5,000 to $15,000 for a three year policy at the standard million per claim. And you need it. Netflix won't take delivery of a film without one, and they're not unusual in that.

So the honest shape of it is this. You can save thousands on the paperwork around the shoot. You shouldn't save a dollar on the paperwork around the money.

Before you spend anything

Four questions I'd sit down with. These are the ones I had to answer for my own budget.

Which of your documents are templates and which have to be custom? Make the actual list. Don't guess.

Is your chain of title complete right now, on paper? Not "I'm pretty sure." On paper, where somebody else could follow it.

Have you taken any money yet, and on what document? If somebody has already given you money and you can't name the instrument, stop reading and go call a lawyer.

What's the legal line in your budget, and is it honestly zero? Because a zero there isn't a savings. It's a bill you've moved to a worse year.

The thing I'd tell myself a year ago

The money you save by skipping a lawyer on the investor documents isn't saved. It's borrowed, at a terrible rate, from a version of you who is going to be much busier and have much less room to fix it.

The shoot paperwork is where you get to be scrappy. The money paperwork is where you get to be boring, and boring is the right call.

Where the numbers came from: attorney hourly ranges from Jurisnation's entertainment lawyer cost guide; E&O premiums, coverage limits and the Netflix delivery requirement from Vitrina's producer guide to entertainment E&O; the PPM page count and the warning about templates from Scene 7's producer's guide to financing with private equity.

I'm a screenwriter and a producer, not a lawyer. This is what I'm learning building my own film. None of those sources is legal advice and neither is this. Get your own counsel before you sign anything.