Spot is making a good point.

Lawyers give professional advice. If they do more than that, they are not there in a capacity as lawyers but as negotiators.

If you want to get the best deal possible, you need to understand all the key issues yourself, to the point where you know when you need to ask your lawyer.

I spent 20 years negotiating international IPR agreements in 52 countries, most of them between $100K and $1M but also some larger than that. I got more than $100M of business from mostly large companies and government agencies, in competition with some of the world's largest and toughest companies.

The ONLY reason I was able to get most of these deals was that I understood every paragraph, sentence and comma of the necessarily complex agreements.

I could modify them to suit any need within minutes or hours, and sign them knowing that I hadn't committed my company to something we'd regret later.

I could never have done these agreements without understanding them fully.

How can you trust a lawyer to have the business judgment for you? That would be like trying to delegate responsibility.

Mark Litwak is a very clear-spoken entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles, specializing in Indies (including many at Sundance this week). He has written a number of books that can be found on Amazon, and he does seminars at UCLA about film financing and IPR agreements. Highly recommended if you want to understand the issues enough to actually negotiate them.