A veteran director with three decades of episodic and feature work, residual statements piling up unread in a home office, a suspicion two productions had never accounted at all, and an estate plan with no IP schedule. We ran the audit, corrected two accountings, and rebuilt the schedule.
His current business manager had inherited the file as-is and had never run an audit. Two productions had gone into international distribution with no corresponding residual accounting on the DGA reports. A third had settled a class residuals claim in which his participation was unclear.
His estate plan referenced his catalog by the phrase "all my directing credits" and had no attached IP schedule.
We pulled ten years of guild residual statements against the DGA credit database, cross-checked against DSP release windows and international broadcast records, and identified two productions with no accounting on record. We opened written inquiries with the payors, filed a guild claim on one, and resolved the second through direct payor accounting. We recovered a defined multiple of his standard episodic residual across the two matters.
We joined the class settlement on the third production through the correct opt-in channel. We built a full IP schedule across his catalog: title, format, guild registration number, credit type, current payor of record, and residual status.
We integrated the schedule into his existing revocable trust, added a directed-trust provision for post-death residual administration, and coordinated with his business manager on a standing quarterly audit cadence going forward.
"I had been leaving money on the table for thirty years. I did not know because no one had ever asked."
— R.C., Veteran Director
Residual accounting depends on someone actually checking the statements against the guild credit database and the distribution windows they correspond to. A file that arrives quarterly and sits unopened is not evidence that everything is fine. It is evidence that no one has looked.
An estate plan that names a catalog by phrase instead of by schedule leaves the hardest work for whoever administers the estate later, usually without the underlying records. R.C.'s plan had been sitting exposed the same way his residual file had, unexamined because it had never caused a visible problem.
We run residual audits and build IP schedules for directors, writers, and producers with long-running catalogs, and we integrate the result directly into existing estate planning rather than leaving it as a separate, disconnected file.
Most engagements are flat fee, quoted before the work begins — and most matters resolve without litigation. Start with a free consultation.