Freelance or business

[Tom Chase]

I been thinking a lot about forming an LLC, sine most of what Im doing is very low budget, I want to protect my self from liability and other benefits of being a business vs a freelancer. Here are my two questions to the group.
1) What was the point when it made sense to be a "company"?
2) how did you go about forming your company (ie legal zoom.com, hired a lawyer, by your self)?

thanks

tommy

 

[Tom Chase]

@Brendan Thanks for the input - I find my self doing more directing now but still I like to get behind the camera a lot. I toyed with the idea of going sole propietiership but when looking at the legal protections (both with credit rating and overall liability) it seemed some sort of corporation made more sense. I do my own films under the name "Tom Chase Films" and have the domain name and email already setup, but I am also in the process of forming a video history project that's called the "Death Cheater Project" which I will ultimately go the 501c3 Non-profit route.

I find my self developing with a producer friend more original content - than working with other production companies; which I can see where they'd want to use 1099er's vs highering out to a company.

I had no idea Legal Zoom was so spammy.

Thanks again.

Tommy