Sean Murray: Welcome back to deBanked TV. I'm here today with
another special guest. I have Chris Dryden, who is the
managing partner of Global Legal Law Firm. Thank you for being
here, Chris.
Chris Dryden: Thanks a lot, Sean. Thanks for having me.
Sean Murray: No problem. So what's it like being back at a
show in person?
Chris Dryden: I have to say being here, is you know,
normally, it's a labor of love trying to mix work with coming
to a show staying focused with what you're doing, and then
manage all the marketing aspect of things. But then, you know,
being off for a year, it's been really nice to come and
reconnect, see what's going on in the industry, especially
after the pandemic and. Yeah. See if things have changed, or
if they, you know, kind of the same, but it's been, it's been
enjoyable just to see face to face with some of these folks.
Sean Murray: Now, it's my understanding that you came here
from California.
Chris Dryden: I did.
Sean Murray: Okay. And you're a San Diego native. Is that right?
Okay.
Chris Dryden: Yeah, I moved there when I was one, but I've
been there ever since.
Sean Murray: Okay.
Chris Dryden: Pretty nice place except for school, but get to
enjoy some sunshine and I live close to the ocean. But, you
know, coming to Florida is not half bad either.
Sean Murray: Yeah. Well, yeah. No, and not for me either, you
know, coming from New Jersey and New York area.
Chris Dryden: Yeah.
Sean Murray: So tell me a little bit about Global Legal Law Firm.
What type of law do you do?
Chris Dryden: So primarily, we're in the payment space.
We've been in the industry kind of backed into it about 2008, I
had an ISO client approach me to do some work for him, I ended up
able to start the firm from it. And as I learned the industry,
we we're able to kind of branch out, find more areas where we
could service, you know, whether it's ISOs, agents, third party
processors, wholesale ISOs. And eventually all the way through
this last year, a lot of merchant work.
Sean Murray: Sure, when you say service them, what kind of
service are you providing?
Chris Dryden: So that's a good question. I initially, you know,
did a lot of contract work, we're kind of like an outside
general counsel for just regular things that a business would
experience, but then got very much more payments specific. So
we do contract review, contract drafting, negotiations with your
processor, either upstream, or agent downstream, do a lot of
M&A work. So that type of transaction, and then we're one
of the few firms that really specialize in litigation. So if
litigation arises somewhere, we're fully equipped to handle
it. So my partner and I, James Huber, we're really
knowledgeable on payments. And then we have four other
litigators in our office that work on litigation related
items, whether it be something very simple to a breach of
contract dispute to regulatory enforcement defense it really
is, you know, whatever kind of comes through, but anything that
touches the payment processing world and the merchant world.
Sean Murray: Did you see more of any of that type of work during
the pandemic? Did any any one area of work increase or any
area of work kind of decrease?
Chris Dryden: Yeah, so it was interesting. Like, initially,
everybody went into like, just stress mode, right? I mean,
there were a lot of people not knowing what was going to
happen, because we were on a lockdown for so long, brick and
mortar dried up, even with more money coming through from the
government, it didn't necessarily mean that things
were going to be okay, going forward. But what we really saw
was that as things started to just kind of gradually ramp back
up, what happened more than anything else was the shift of
the merchants having to go online to maintain their
existing business. And so now you have people that never had
really a e-commerce presence or an online presence, where that
became a large portion of their business. And in doing that, the
processors weren't necessarily ready to underwrite that type of
business. And so when you have merchants that are unfamiliar
with how to actually process or accept payment, at a remote, you
know, distance, it caused some problems, you know, so we've
done a lot of merchant work where you've had match
placement, or just termination of agreements. And then
residuals being held, but not really good reasons for these
things happening. And so we've been representing a lot more
merchants over the last six to 12 months just to remedy issues
that have come from having to go online to actually run their
business.
Sean Murray: Yeah, that's interesting. You know, I've
talked about some risk earlier on the street here. And I was
talking about how processors have to underwrite risk, just
like a lender would have to underwrite a loan. But I, you
know, I hadn't thought of how that might affect a merchant
during the pandemic, because the processor is shifting the type
of, you know, transactions that they originally underwrote that
merchant for.
Chris Dryden: Yeah, well, it's not even necessarily that the
transactions are shifting, but it's the fact that the way that
they're doing things is shifting, for instance, you
know, a lot, a lot of home improvement happened during the
pandemic, people started putting a lot more money into their
house. We had a guy that came to us, he's a pool supplies guy,
but all of his business where he had a storefront before had gone
to remote. And so he was doing this here, I'm ordering from my
distributor, I'm getting things in I'm, I'm having him go out
and invoicing. He was having to adjust to how he was doing
things. But all of a sudden, his online card not present volume
went from 10% of his business to 90%. And then you have a
processor. It's not necessarily looking at oh okay, well, what
is really going on? And so in that regard, you know, you have
that aspect of, well, now we have to re underwrite this guy
for a different type of business.
Sean Murray: Sure. Yeah, I can, I can only, you know, I had not
even thought of that, that aspect of it of the processor
having underwritten the merchant for one way, and then they go
from like, you know, 10% key entered to like, you know, 90%
90% Yeah. 100% Yeah. Right, I guess, especially in the case of
the pandemic, where they they couldn't do any sales in person,
that's certainly a big part of it. Earlier today, you were on a
panel. And there there was a lot of different topics of
discussion and one of them was like, CB, CB. CBD? Yeah, like
what's happening in like that area of the world?
Chris Dryden: That's a tough, that's a tough answer. Yeah. So
you got a lot of agencies that are looking at this space, you
know, CBD is gonna happen, it's gonna happen in some way, shape,
or form. But, you know, there's the aspect of, you know, is it a
medicinal item. So you've got, you know, it being proffered out
as a medicinal thing. So now you got the FDA looking at it, used
to be, you know, marijuana is illegal, you know, schedule one
drugs, the DEA looks at it. Then you have CBD, where they're the
farm bill comes out from the FDA, and it says, oh, well, you
can extract certain things, you know, so now you can have CBD
products, but then that's being treated differently from states
from marijuana laws. And so in commerce, it's gonna happen,
there's no way to stop the force of what's gonna take place. And
so the fact that they're gonna have to figure out how to
standardize it. And until that happens, you're gonna have all
these competing factions, whether it be the federal
government versus the states, or what's legal, what's not legal,
you know, you know, people trying to find a way into the
marketplace by, you know, extracting a different type of
the marijuana plant or the cannabis plant to be able to
like actually sell that off as whatever it's gonna be. So it's
been very interesting to see how there's this discord between
these things. So until they find some standardization. So for us,
what we see is just a really hard product to place. You know,
you have people that are out there, and then you have bad
actors that are out there that are, you know, potentially
calling it magic or a miracle. And so it's hard for the
processors and the underwriters, in addition to the regulatory
work to look at it and go oh, okay, is are they really selling
something that they're supposed to be selling? You know, things
along that that line. So CBD is just one of these things that
has a really high margin because it has a high risk aspect.
Sean Murray: Yeah, you were talking to me off camera about
about, you know, high risk like, like what's what's happening
within like the high risk space of payments, is there any any
particular?
Chris Dryden: It's it's so there's hard to place.
Traditionally, there has been hard to place merchants, whether
it's gaming, or it's adult, or nutraceuticals, even anything,
where there's a higher possibility of a chargeback,
just because it's at a distance, you know, people are making, you
know, certain claims or representations about the
efficacy of a product or this or that. I think a lot of things
that are happening in that space is just because it's a high
margin for high risk when you have a hard to place product,
like we were talking about earlier, if you don't have
processing, you really don't have business. Right. So if you
don't have processing, then, you know, essentially, do you even
have property or an opportunity to succeed under the American
dream, as we so call it. And so when people are looking for
processing, they're looking to pay more, which means that the
processors can charge more, they're gonna be more of a
markup for the agents. So anything that's in high risk,
where people are having an issue, trying to find a home for
it, you're just automatically gonna see more interest in it.
Sean Murray: Okay, I can understand that. I think you
mentioned that you also do some collections work in the working
capital space, as well.
Chris Dryden: We do. We have a couple of partners in working
capital, we're, whether it's an MCA or a traditional commercial
loan, sometimes a factoring agreement, but they're a little
bit more complex. You know, if there's a default, and they
can't do something pre litigation, in certain states,
they farm it out to us. And we go ahead and do collections
litigation, getting the judgments, is the easy part,
getting the money's the more difficult part, but we have a
very systematic process that we follow with a really experienced
staff. And so we're in California, Oregon, Washington,
traditionally, we do a couple of other states. But, you know,
we've been doing that for about five, six years. And it's just
part of what we do. It's just got my own little unit or team
within the law firm that handles it. So you know, we just try to
collect money for you guys.
Sean Murray: Nice.
Chris Dryden: Yeah.
Sean Murray: I'm sure everyone's happy about that.
Chris Dryden: Most of the time, most the time, you know, a lot
of times it's something that happens down the road, like I
was discussing with you where we we get a judgment lien and you
know, we place it down, and then somebody wants to actually
refinance a property that they're still holding on to and
it's appreciated. But. Yeah. Ultimately, you know, sometimes
it takes a little while, but we just try to remain consistent in
our efforts. You know, try to find any property that we can
attach to and keep pushing the paper as much as possible once
we get it.
Sean Murray: Yeah, I think that gets lost on some companies that
they want to collect on what's outstanding immediately. Right.
And they don't realize that it could be a waiting game, but it
will happen eventually.
Chris Dryden: It's a long game. Yeah, and there is a short term
aspect to it, I think if you can hit it while it's hot, you have
a better chance at least in the immediate. Yeah. But once it
gets past like, what, 60, 90 days? Yeah. I'm just in it for
the long haul. And maybe I got a vacation later on because we hit
something big.
Sean Murray: Yeah. Where would you go on vacation? You're from
San Diego, what's vacation for you?
Chris Dryden: Next place I want to go is Colombia.
Sean Murray: Okay.
Chris Dryden: I've been there once before. And it's a
beautiful country and it's 310 roundtrip right now from LAX.
Sean Murray: Can't go wrong.
Chris Dryden: I figure maybe there, or always wanted to go to
New Zealand and Australia. So those are on my bucket list.
Sean Murray: Okay. Well, I think you know, they're gonna open
back up soon, if they're not open already.
Chris Dryden: I hope so.
Sean Murray: Yeah.
Chris Dryden: I hope just like us, I hope that we're open as
soon as we can possibly can be.
Sean Murray: My last question for you is, how has the show
been for you? It's the end of the second day, it's almost it's
almost over, you know, what's been the takeaway for you here?
Chris Dryden: I think the take away, the biggest takeaways is
that, even though we've gone through quite a bit of an
adjustment, it's still the same thing. But I think if there's
one thing that I would focus on, and that I would talk to the
people in payments about, is just that when I first got into
payments, it was sort of like, here, it's one size fits all.
And as things get more dynamic in the payment space, what I've
noticed more and more is that you really have to look at your
merchant and figure out, what's their value add? How can I
really help them like and it might not be one solution, it
might be two or three solutions where you know, I have a client,
I can't really say who they are, but they do surcharging. And
they've gotten a lot of institutional players that are
now doing surcharging for credit cards where they have a program
where they're able to service them. And now we've gotten away
from the traditional check, and they're actually having no cost
associated with it, because the surcharge eats up the
interchange fee. And then there's still profit for our
clients. And so they went out and they developed a technology
that really focused on a certain industry or sector. And now
they've, you know, the sky's the limit if they can get all these
institutions because it's super high volume. And so I think if
you can look at the merchant base that you're, you know,
trying to service or sign. I think if you can see where their
value ads are, there's so many payment processing options out
there. You can offer them a segmented like solution that's
not just you know, singular.
Sean Murray: Okay. Well, I appreciate your time. Thank you
so much for being here.
Chris Dryden: Appreciate your's.
Sean Murray: That was that was Chris Dryden from Global Legal
Law Firm. Thank you very much.
Chris Dryden: Have a good day.