Eric Kelting didn't know e-discovery existed until the day he interviewed for a job in it. Eleven years into running Complete Legal, the litigation support company he co-founded in 2014, he can trace the entrepreneurial thread all the way back to a dilapidated movie theater two blocks from his childhood home that he used to daydream about buying. This conversation walks through the slow path from a lawn-mowing route, to a college newspaper ad staff, to a full-time leap he took over Thanksgiving weekend, with his wife's blessing and his own stomach in knots.
What You'll Hear
- What e-discovery actually is, and why Complete Legal still prints millions of pages a year for trial
- How an old empty movie theater at the end of Eric's street planted the entrepreneurial seed in middle school
- The college newspaper ad staff role that turned into a million-dollar P&L by the time Eric was business manager
- Why Eric is a farmer, not a hunter, and how that shaped his lane as COO rather than CEO or CRO
- The Thanksgiving 2014 conversation with his wife where he asked to quit his stable corporate job nine months in
- How journaling his fears on paper helped neutralize the self-doubt of going full time on Complete Legal
- Why COVID actually grew the business for a while, and how the pipeline gap caught up with them in 2023
- What Entrepreneurs Organization and a monthly half-day of phones-down reflection has done for Eric's operating rhythm
What e-discovery actually does for litigators
Eric co-founded Complete Legal in 2014 as a litigation support and e-discovery provider. In plain terms, when two parties go to court, their lawyers request documents from each other, review them for privilege and relevance, and then exchange what's responsive. Complete Legal sits in the middle of that process. They gather data off devices, normalize it into a format attorneys can review, help produce it to opposing counsel, and get it ready for trial.
The industry goes back 30 or 40 years, to the era when discovery meant emptying file cabinets, walking into a corporate records room, and photocopying the whole thing. Complete Legal still has a division that scans and digitizes old paper. They print millions of pages a year. Even now, courts often want hard-copy exhibits, which gets interesting when the source is a Teams chat, a text message, or a spreadsheet that was never meant to live on 8.5 by 11 paper.
What's changed is the surface area. Discovery today pulls from email, Teams, calendar invites, CRM data, cell phones, cloud storage, and industry-specific systems like CAD drawings for architects. On top of that sits the metadata layer: when a document was sent, when it was opened, who authored it. That's why Eric's industry has had to evolve from paper workflows into data pipelines, and why technology and machine assistance (the precursor to full AI) have become part of the work.
The entrepreneurial seed that showed up in middle school
Eric says he always knew he'd be a business owner, even if he had no idea what the business would be. His earliest evidence is a vivid memory of an old turn-of-the-century movie theater two blocks from his childhood house. It had gone out of business, couldn't keep up with the newer multiplexes, and sat dilapidated. Eric would walk past it and spitball what he'd do with the empty building if he could get his hands on it. His mom still reminds him about those conversations.
His first real venture was the standard entrepreneurial starter kit. He printed flyers, walked them through his neighborhood, built a client list, and ran a lawn route. He loaded his mower, gas can, and rake on foot and pushed up the hill to each job. His mom made a point of teaching him that the mower and the gas weren't free. They'd be expenses if he were actually running a real business. At 14, that was a foreign concept. Looking back, Eric sees it as the first lesson in the gap between revenue and profit.
Eric makes a larger point here that frames much of the rest of the conversation. Culture glamorizes the idea. Shark Tank, cocktail-napkin pitches, and the next big app all treat the idea as the valuable thing. A friend of his put it differently: ideas are cheap, it's what you do with them that matters. The book E-Myth, recommended to Eric by his eye doctor right before he went full time, reinforced the same point. Being your own boss doesn't mean doing your craft. It means doing your craft and running a business on top of it.
How a college ad staff turned into a million-dollar P&L
Eric started his freshman year at Wichita State, then transferred to KU. In an intro class that first semester, he got a message that stuck: employers want a strong resume, not just good grades. That reframed the next five years for him.
He joined the business fraternity AKPsi. He applied to the student newspaper's ad staff and became a sales rep his sophomore year. The University Daily Kansan operated on about a 1.2 million dollar budget, most of it funded by ad sales. Eric had a territory, revenue goals, and a quota. He spent four years on that staff, moving through middle management and eventually sitting in the business manager seat, which ran the entire ad operation and hired the rest of the team.
He also became president of AKPsi for a semester. Years later, at an EO event, Eric realized the pattern. In college he was running a roughly million-dollar business and serving as chapter president. In his forties, he was running Complete Legal and serving as president of EO Kansas City. Same shape, twenty years apart. He didn't recognize what he was building skill-wise at the time. He was making beer money, meeting friends, and padding his resume. The real-world reps he was logging in sales, budgeting, and management only registered in hindsight.
He also learned early that he's not a natural hunter. Cold calling makes him clam up. He can't sell something he doesn't believe in. Give him one user inside an account, though, and he'll win the rest of that account over time through service and follow-through. Farmer, not hunter. That self-knowledge eventually shaped which seat he took when Complete Legal's founders divided roles.
The Thanksgiving conversation and the full-time leap
Eric spent eight years in the e-discovery industry working for a company that was bought and sold several times. He stayed in the same physical office while the logo and ownership structure kept changing around him. By the end, he was in a national role, traveling heavily, home less than his young family needed. When he left, he went back to a large company on purpose. He promised his wife three years of stable corporate benefits so their kids could get through early childhood before he scratched the entrepreneurial itch.
In 2014, six months in, Eric and his two co-founders launched Complete Legal as a side business. The plan was to keep day jobs, hire a couple of people, and treat it as mailbox money. Eric was nervous to break the news to his wife that he was starting something, even on the side. Her response, on a drive to Wichita, was, I know, I get it. I know who I married. Eric credits his father-in-law Paul for that. His wife grew up as an only child of an entrepreneur who ran a residential construction business out of the house. Bookkeeping at the kitchen table and Saturday job sites were her normal.
The side-business plan lasted about two months. Their first employees sat the founders down and told them the demand was real and they couldn't passively invest. Over Thanksgiving 2014, Eric had the second conversation with his wife, asking to quit his stable job and go full time on Complete Legal starting January. Everyone in the family was excited when they heard the news. Eric was miserable. He describes that weekend as the most self-doubt he's ever carried. He couldn't see past the lost paycheck, the lost benefits, the lost health insurance, the fear of failing his partners and his family.
Someone's book, whose author he no longer remembers, told him to journal his fears and read them out loud. Fears shrink when you drag them out of the darkness. Eric had never journaled before. He still has that notebook. Writing down each fear, reading it, and then taking one concrete action the next morning was how he neutralized it.
COVID, the delayed pipeline hit, and getting comfortable being uncomfortable
The first four to six weeks of COVID were nasty. Complete Legal sent employees home with scanners and documents because the paper side of their work can't happen over Zoom. Then something counterintuitive happened. They grew through COVID. Their electronic work picked up because lawyers were working from home and needed billable work. They grew year over year for their first eight years in business.
The catch was the pipeline. Lawyers weren't bringing in new cases during the lockdown stretch, which meant Complete Legal wasn't getting fed new cases either. That created a hole that didn't bite until 2023, by which point all the government and substitute programs had long expired. 2021 and 2022 looked fine on paper, but the pipeline gap eventually caught up with them. Eric frames it as a lagging indicator most business owners underestimated.
Eric is also candid about what changed his day-to-day operating rhythm. He joined Entrepreneurs Organization just before the pandemic. EO requires members to lock themselves in a room for half a day once a month, phones down, electronics-free, to work on themselves. Most members arrive kicking and screaming, convinced they're too important to be unreachable. The shift, Eric says, is realizing that if you went into business for autonomy and can't give yourself a half day a month, you're doing it wrong.
Working with a mental health coach, using tools like Culture Index to understand his own wiring and his partners', walking, sitting in saunas, meditating, working out at the end of the day to mentally flush it. None of that was in his toolkit five years ago. Now it's the infrastructure. When Sam asks for a closing North Star, Eric lands on something he's been chewing on this week: get comfortable being uncomfortable. That's where growth happens. And for his giants, Eric points to Brad Jenkins, a vendor-turned-friend who was a decade or so ahead of him, gave Complete Legal favorable pricing to help them get going, and eventually nudged Eric into EO in the first place.
About Eric Kelting
Eric Kelting is Chief Operating Officer and co-founder of Complete Legal, a Kansas City based litigation support and e-discovery provider he helped launch in 2014 after eight years in the industry. He earned an advertising degree at KU, spent four years on the student newspaper's ad staff, and later led EO Kansas City as chapter president and served on the regional board.