About THE Practice
Practice Areas
- Business formation, capitalization, and strategic planning.
- Business mergers, acquisitions, reorganizations, and sales.
- Contracts, employment counselling, and other general business matters.
- Real estate acquisition, financing, and disposition.
- Real estate development and construction contracts.
The Approach
Three fundamentals guide our work at Stranger Creek Advisors:
- Risk is to be managed, not avoided. An objective advisor can help you assess business and legal risks, and a good negotiator can help you mitigate them, but risk-taking is a part of every successful business or real estate venture. We understand that. We don't tell our clients "no," but rather "the potential consequences of that action are...."
- Avoid sweeping things under the rug and kicking cans down the road. Business and real estate principals should have awkward “what if” conversations and consider contingencies early on, before issues arise. If they address these questions head-on, they’ll have better results and better relationships down the road when it comes time to divide the pot of gold—or shovel the pile of manure.
- The best legal work will not fix a bad business deal. No matter how good a set of transaction documents may be, they can only mitigate…not eliminate…the consequences of a fundamentally flawed transaction. That’s why we bring our own “real world” management experience to the table to help clients identify transaction risks through due diligence and negotiation strategies that focus on the most likely and most potentially damaging risks, rather than on remote or inconsequential ones. We would rather help clients avoid problems than work their way out of them.
If we share these three principles in common, we can do great things together.
Gateway to an Interdisciplinary Team of Professionals
Stranger Creek Advisors may at first appear to be just a few business lawyers, but those lawyers' network includes numerous trusted attorneys who are experienced in litigation, intellectual property, wealth planning, taxation, and other specialties that compliment his practice, as well as non-attorney business consultants, engineers, architects and planners, accounting and finance professionals, bankers and brokers, and other specialists that most businesses and real estate enterprises need on their team. If a matter falls outside their expertise, they can introduce other professionals who can handle it efficiently, and who will approach the matter with the same value-conscious, outcomes-based orientation they share.
THE ATTORNEYS
Robert J. Drumm, Attorney and Principal
Robert J. Drumm began practicing law in 2002, graduating with top honors from the University of Kansas School of Law after working several years in the printing and packaging industries. He holds a Bachelor's degree and a Master's degree from Texas Tech University. Robert is licensed to practice in Kansas and Missouri.
Robert brings a unique background to his transaction practice areas. He began his legal career as an associate in one of the region's leading real estate practice groups at a large Kansas City law firm, and continued in business transactions with a large international firm. Robert then served as associate general counsel to a publicly-traded real estate investment trust, where he ran over $2 billion in acquisitions, dispositions and financing; he advised asset management and development teams; and he assisted in corporate governance and securities compliance. He also managed outside counsel and provided strategic guidance to the company in disputes ranging from small landlord-tenant cases to high-stakes litigation.
Robert’s background also includes five years as an entrepreneur. He built a small, home-based packaging supply company into a well-known and respected supplier serving the craft beverage industry, with a nationally-focused sales staff and a traditional bricks-and-mortar presence. After selling the business to investors from a private equity group, he refocused on his transactions practice and worked both independently and with a middle-market firm in Kansas City.
Robert’s work as in-house counsel for a publicly-traded company, as a small business owner, and as a real estate investor helps him stay focused on the real-world objectives behind legal matters—whether they be transactions, compliance issues, or litigation—and he especially enjoys working with entrepreneurs in planning for growth, in addressing challenges, and in smoothing out the inevitable transitions in the life cycle of a business or a real estate asset. He also enjoys working with churches and charitable organizations in real estate and organizational management projects.
Most of Robert’s time outside the office is devoted to his wife and five children, and to activities at his family’s third-generation farm in Coffey County, Kansas.
Christie M. King, Attorney
Christie M. King practiced law with the corporate securities practice group of a large St. Louis Firm in the 1990s after graduating near the top of her class at the Washington University School of Law. She holds a bachelor’s degree from St. Mary’s College, South Bend, Indiana, and she is licensed to practice in Missouri (active) and Illinois (inactive).
Christie worked as an associate in the corporate practice group of a large St. Louis Firm before taking twenty-one years off from practice to raise a family and work in both in higher education and K-12 education administration, most recently as a Vice Principal of a private school in Kansas City from August 2014 to the 2021. She resumed her legal practice in 2019 and now works with the firm’s clients in business formation and governance, contracts and general corporate matters, and small business, real estate transactions and estate planning.
Christie’s background as an administrator (and a mother) compliments her legal training, giving her the ability to manage parties with disparate interests and varied perspectives, and to take care of the seemingly-small-but-important details that keep a client organization running.
Most of Christie’s time outside the practice is devoted to her husband and four children, and she continues some work with the private school.
Michael G. King, Attorney
Michael King earned his law degree from the University of Missouri - Kansas City . He also holds an MBA from the Thunderbird School of Management at Arizona State University, a Master of Science degree from Fort Hays State University, and a Bachelor's degree from Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas. He is licensed in Missouri.
Michael is involved in special projects for the firm, especially in succession and estate planning, business startup and finance, acquisitions and dispositions, and higher-education compliance and strategy.
Michael continues to serve full-time as Director of the School of Business, Director of the Business Graduate Programs, and Associate Professor of Finance at Benedictine College. His experience with several start-up businesses and a small investment banking firm gives him particular insight into the management, legal and financial issues facing small to mid-market business owners, and his experience in higher education administration, dealing with strategic issues and repositioning, accreditation, and compliance for small institutions, make him a valuable resource to some of the firm's nonprofit clients.
Why "Stranger Creek"?
It's home.
The firm's principal, Robert Drumm, lives in rural Leavenworth County, Kansas, near the actual Stranger Creek. In 2019, he moved our office to Overland Park, where he can meet clients, but in the time of plague, we all became more comfortable working mask-free out of our home offices, which--for Robert--is back near Stranger Creek.
It's unique.
We often have to tell our clients "Sorry, but your great LLC name is already taken." This one wasn't. It satisfies the requirements of Kansas law and differentiates us from other business entities. And in any case...substantively...it doesn't matter what the name is. You're hiring the people, not the firm name (unless perhaps you're hiring a really expensive national/international firm for its reputation, in which case you wouldn't call our little firm in the first place).
BTW, in circumstances where its appropriate to hire a larger firm, or even just a different firm, either because your needs exceed our capacity, your issue requires special skills we don't have, or you need to leverage the other firm's name recognition and reputation, we'll be the first to tell you so, and we'll even introduce you to attorneys at some suitable larger firms if you wish).
It sounds interesting...at least from a distance
The name "Stranger Creek" is pretty cool--the sort of place-name you could make a Netflix series about. But the real Stranger Creek in Leavenworth County is just a small, muddy farmland stream that frequently floods, as it carries most of the county's rainfall to the Kansas River. Perhaps our firm's name is a little metaphor for the typical transaction? At first, at a high level, it's an exciting deal. Then you look closer and see the muck, the swimming carp, the old tires, the remnants of plastic riding toys lost to children upstream, and the other flotsam and jetsam along the bank. But you keep working downstream to reach a satisfactory endpoint: despite the mud and the rubbish, you've reached your goal. So, in a (perhaps strained) way, our firm name is reflective of what we do.