Say I hire an artist or a composer to do some work for me. I write up some contracts for them, stating that I own the license to the thing they're producing for me, etc.. Every contract I've seen has been between an individual and a company. Instead of having a contract read:

"This agreement is made by and between [companyLegal] and [Person's Name]"

having read:

"This agreement is made by and between [myName] and [Person's Name]"

You might be wondering: "Why not just register a business or LLC first?". The answer is, I'm planning on doing that, but I'm applying to a self-employment measure offered by the gov't of Quebec. It's for people on EI who want to start a business. I may not be able to qualify for it if I already have a business registered, and I could get my EI payments stopped if I register a business.

I could wait until I have a company registered, but I'd like my artist and composer to start sooner, rather than later.

edit: Bolded [myname]

As you're familiar with code, you can look at some code and immediately recognize issues like code that doesn't test for null, data that is out of bounds, and functions that don't do what they claim to do.

Lawyers do exactly the same thing, but with legal code. They immediately recognize when important stuff is missing, can see flaws where what you wrote doesn't do what you think it does, and so on.

Business lawyers are usually fairly cheap, especially for commonplace agreements like this and if you shop around. Spend a couple hundred bucks for some time with a lawyer to get the right contracts. Failure to get the correct contracts in place can cause serious issues. I've seen and even once been at a company where a buyout was aborted because of improper contracts.

Let's say you start to win the game industry jackpot and produce something amazing and popular that rakes in money. It could be five years down the road when your small studio is doing rather well, you get the option to make millions of dollars in a deal only to discover that due to a bad contract you don't own what you thought you owned, and you cannot find the person to get the rights you need.

Talk to the lawyer. Get the proper forms. Do it right and take the grown-up approach to business instead of pretending to be in business like a young child writing their own pretend contracts.

Are you calling me cheap, Frob? ;)

Perhaps a better wording than "fairly cheap" is "relatively inexpensive".

I don't know what monalaw or others in the group charge, but for basic business needs the group I use is $150/hr. The occasional work I need done is often one billable hour, rarely two or three hours. That is far less expensive than the five-digit or six-digit figure needed for a legal defense, or the potentially millions lost on cancelling a major contract or business acquisition.

We also have to be realistic though. A lot of assets are changing hands for much less than $150, or are done on a revenue share basis, so to get even just 1 hour of legal advice could be doubling or tripling someone's costs.

As in this case, looking to hire an artist and composer and form an LLC to develop a product for market.

The small cost of a few hours of lawyer time is dwarfed by those costs.