does anyone here have experience with going the legal route to protect their lps? I'd gladly spend a few thousand to get rid of these copy pasters, I just am not 100% sure of the route to take.
To my understanding, you have to register copyright on your work before you can file a legal claim to protect it.
Is the best way to do this to go directly to copright.gov?
to issue a C&D or DMCA takedown, does that document need to be drafted by a lawyer or are there boilerplate forms available for this?
also any feedback or experience you guys have had with taking this route would be much appreciated, thanks!
DMCA doesn't require a lawyer if you are the rights holder on your LP. When you sent a dmca, make sure you cc the hosting company and their upstream provider.
If you are talking about offer/product pages, just dmca their processing company for the fastest results 
There you go: http://www.mcanerin.com/EN/articles/copyright-03.asp
You take down one copy paster, another two shows up 