  Sufficient control of transition form factors is a vital ingredient for the
precision flavor programs including the nearer term searches at the Large
Hadron Collider (LHC) and the forthcoming Belle II experiment. We improve on
existing methods to extract B -> K^* form factor ratios at low hadronic recoil
from B -> K^* l^+ l^- data on the angular observables F_L, A_T^(2) and P'_4 by
adding heavy quark symmetry-based constraints and by investigating the cross
talk between low and large recoil. The data-extracted form factor ratios i)
provide benchmarks for the lattice and light cone sum rule predictions, the
latter of which have been updated including improved uncertainty estimations
and ii) allow to improve the predictions for benchmark observables. We find
that present data on the forward-backward asymmetry A_FB and the angular
observable P'_5 at low recoil are in good agreement with the Standard Model.
