Jeff Dreiling and Eric Kelting: Building Complete Legal

Brad BurrowHello, thanks for joining us on the In A World with Real Media Podcast. I'm here with Jeff Dreiling and Eric Kelting of Complete Legal. They've been in the legal industry since the early 2000s and they launched Complete Legal in 2014 with the mission of serving small and medium sized firms. They launched with two people in a small office and have grown to 25 employees, many from the legal industry, who are committed to serving their clients. Guys, we've been working together for a while now. I remember back in the day when ... what was the company called back then? I don't know, maybe don't want to mention it.

Jeff DreilingNo, no, it's the [crosstalk 00:00:35] I refer to it, yeah.

Brad BurrowI remember those days, and we were as a company really getting into litigation support from a video and animation standpoint. So really and that all came from one client that was doing a lot of IP work in Chicago Bay Connect at the time. Then the guys, like everybody in the legal industry leave and go start their own thing and go a whole different direction. Now we were out of the IP Litigation Support business. Is that how it goes? Is that the way it is with you guys? People just move around all the time?

Jeff DreilingWe have a joke in we can never count on a project literally until we have a signed agreement, issue the bill and receive the check. Because so much changes and attorneys will leave when things are sure deals, and you're sitting there built up for something huge, and the letdown is immense. It happens all the time in legal because things outside of your control dictate your success even though you've done everything right, the case settles. It goes away.

Brad BurrowIt's so true, and how do you as a business owner, you can't even plan for that really.

Eric KeltingIt's difficult, I used to think it was our industry, very young, immature industry and incestuous industry, but it actually we follow the attorneys and that's a very old professional yet attorneys are very transit by nature. I had a Litigation Support Manager of a large Kansas City firm tell me one time that she didn't work for a 450 person law firm, she worked for 450 solo practitioners all under the same roof. Yeah, attorneys are very, you know, they've got their practice group, their support team, their clients, and they tend to move around quite a bit and start their own law firms, that kind of thing. Our industry seems to follow suit.

Brad BurrowWhich is why it's so hard to sell to them too, isn't it? You can't just sell to one big firm, now you're selling to each individual attorney.

Jeff DreilingYeah, and not only that, but you have, in large part, even the non-attorneys working in the law firm, let's say, paralegals, they've got, in most cases, a four-year college degree. Plus, if they didn't know they wanted to be a paralegal when they were 18, they've gone back and gotten a two-year certificate. We're dealing largely with a client base or a prospect base that has got post-secondary degrees, and so they're educated and they're probably as a group, the most skeptical people in this country. Because they see all the things that go wrong, and so when you're walking in as a salesperson, you're not starting at zero, you're starting at -10. You have to be willing to and go through the effort of building a relationship of trust, which sometimes can take years just to get to zero for the right for them to listen to buy your product or your service in our case.

Brad BurrowYeah, it's so challenging.

Jeff DreilingIt is, but glass half full side of that is, is that there's opportunities for a couple of guys like Eric and I to be in this industry and to do amazingly fun things that we never thought were possible. Because a big multinational corporation can't just come in and create it better than we do. If they could, they would. But because it is so much hand to hand combat, because it is so much customization, it's a crack in the sidewalk that allows people that are willing to risk at all and work and do whatever it takes to actually be successful and not come from any prestigious university. Eric and I are both from the University of Kansas, it's a great school, but when you see that on a resume, it's not going to get the attention of Wall Street, right?

Brad BurrowYeah.

Jeff DreilingBut in this industry, it doesn't matter, it's are you willing to do the work? Can you give of yourself and be transparent to the customers both personally and professionally? So that the congruence of the image they have of you works so that they can trust you. That's the reason I love it is the reason most people that are smarter than me and have more money than me would never even think about doing it, right?

Brad BurrowYeah, that's interesting. This is a podcast about storytelling, that's what we like to talk about here at Real Media. How does that story resonate with the people that you're trying to talk to? Do they respond positively to that?

Eric KeltingYes and no. Yeah, I did a lot in the early days, in the early years of Complete Legal. Complete Legal starts because Jeff and I were in this industry for a number of years, we worked for regional and national companies and constant mergers, acquisitions. We changed name several times, rotating door of CEOs, and just got very-

Brad BurrowIt had to be frustrating, yeah.

Eric KeltingIt was extremely frustrating, and I think that's when we crossed paths with you and I think we've realized towards the end how little control we had over our own destiny, even though we felt like we were making a huge impact here in Kansas City. And we had a client base that loved us and we felt like we had a lot of control here, but we really didn't. Complete Legal starts because we get burn up, burnout, chewed up, and leave and are sitting around lunch one day talking about can we still make money with this type of business, starting at this time?

Brad BurrowQuestioning everything?

Eric KeltingYeah, we're like, "Well, yeah, if you did it our way." We just we saw a need here in Kansas City for that small to mid sized law firm that needed support, that needed a number of services that companies like us as they were getting bigger and bigger and bigger and where private equity was saturating our market. Had no interest in servicing that segment, and so Complete Legal starts as that hometown company in our story and being local and having roots here and having our client base here was really important to our clients. I think as we've grown, we've had to mature away from that a little bit. But that story still resonates with our local clients a lot.

Brad BurrowAttorneys like the fact that you're a local firm that's building up and would you agree with that?

Jeff DreilingThey do, but it's also one of the biggest obstacles that we have to overcome and-

Brad BurrowGreatest strength and the greatest obstacle at the same time.

Jeff DreilingIt is, they're intrigued by it and it's almost like when we first started our business, we didn't do a ton of research because it's the industry we lived in and grew up in. But we did go back to some of the larger clients that we thought we had some of the best relationships with and said, "Hey, Eric and I are thinking about getting the band back together and doing this right. What do you think about that?" He was like, "Oh, that'd be great. Whatever we can do to help just let us know." We went into it even more naive than normal, and when we started it was like, "All right, we're open." We called those same people back and they're like, "Hey, good for you, we'll be rooting for you." It was like, "Well, wait, that's ..."