All right, we a re on the clock. So, great, we'll get started here. I'm Ron Josey. I cover the internet sector here at Citi, and I'm really happy to have with us today, Jeff Stibel, Noel Watson. I almost said a different name, so Noel Watson, of course, from LegalZoom. Jeff, you've been the CEO now, or you stepped into the CEO role about a year and a quarter ago. Is that about right? Just about. Yep. Noel, you and I have known each other for a while now. I think you've been here since IPO. That's right. Actually, I'm really looking forward to this conversation because LegalZoom is a market leader. I think we all know that, in online legal and compliance services, but, you know, we're expanding to newer businesses. We're doing a newer space, make the shift to subscriptions, and so hopefully we'll dive into all this stuff, so. Love it. Jeff, we'll start out with you, right? So you're about a year and two months, year and a quarter in at this role. Of course, you've always been part of the company and aware of the company, but a lot's changed in the past year, and so would love if, you know, talk to us a little bit about the changes that you've put through with the organization and sort of where we are in that journey of the evolution of LegalZoom. Sure. And I think when you look under the covers deeply, you've been deeply involved with the business, so, so have I. It looks like a lot has changed, but strategically, we've only made two relatively simple shifts, and done that using a third to open up TAM. First, we started to re-emphasize our subscription business. So we have an emphasis on driving that subscription business forward, and, you know, that's been punctuated, you know, over the last quarter with showing accelerated 10% growth. Yep. We expect that to, you know, to continue. And the second thing is leveraging this notion of augmented intelligence. So, you know, LegalZoom being the leader, one of the things that we do better than anyone is provide premium legal and compliance services. But we were in our, you know, in our zeal to capture more of the market, we were going downmarket. So we moved back upmarket. We started launching another number of Do It For Me products, both in compliance, legal, and otherwise. And we did that by, you know, by expanding our TAM, by focusing on other channels outside of what was historically our top-of-funnel, which were in corporations. You look at those two plus one things strategically, a lot underneath it. That's what's driven the, you know, the transformation and the success today. So one of the things I think, when we went through the call and we spoke afterwards, there's sort of three key focus areas for the business, and you mentioned subscription, of course, but then also leveraging AI as well. Yep. Of course, there was the acquisition of Formation Nation. Let's maybe we can unpack those three. Organize subscriptions, go-to-market strategy leveraging AI. Let's unpack each one of those, one by one and try to understand, sort of help us understand where we're going. So subscription biz. Yes. Back to double-digit growth. Ahead of plan, I think, was the comment. Compliance packages were highlighted as a strong demand, bookkeeping, et cetera, but Do It For Me is sort of like going forward. So just walk us through the drivers double-digit growth fine for 2Q, but when you see this going out for the next umpteen quarters, like, what's gonna drive that subscription growth to this consistent, greater visibility so Noel can, you know, sleep better at night and, you know, et cetera, et cetera? And again, that really three-part strategy is what drives it. It creates durability because it insulates us. You know, if you look at that push to subscription, what, why? Because a business that is oriented towards subscription, it drives durability drives sustainability. Ultimately, if you're providing greater value for your customers over time, your cost of acquisition is lower, and you retain those customers, and it's a lot cheaper to keep a customer than it is to bring in a new one. For sure. You know, the notion around finding new addressable markets, right? Different go-to-market channels. The idea there was we were so beholden to small business starts, that we were only able to grow so much as that macro was growing. By decoupling from it, which we have largely done at this point, we're able to use that as a key channel, but not the exclusive channel, and we do all of this by creating a new product strategy around AI. You know, this is what I was referring to when I said augmented intelligence. What most people are thinking about when they think AI, they're thinking about using AI to replace humans and experts. What we're talking about is to leverage AI to make our experts and expertise more scalable. Sure. So what we were able to do, you know, with a lawyer covering 10 customers, we can now do with 1,000 or 10,000. That's ultimately the goal in those upcoming quarters, because ultimately, that will drive scalable, profitable growth. We're in the early innings, but we've already seen some pretty strong proof points. You know, we're seeing long-term churn trends going down, particularly in our compliance products. We're adding value. We're seeing ARPU in those products going up. And, you know, the services that we're launching around Do It For Me and Concierge and these higher-level services that are leveraging both robust technology and AI, as well as expertise, we've got more demand than we can fulfill right now. So it's, you know, it's pretty exciting. And so let's unpack a few of these. Decoupled from macro, hard to do. Talk to us. I understand leveraging AI to scale up and to be able to service so many more, but how do you decouple from macro? So, you can't decouple from the macro. Right. But you can decouple from a macro. Okay. You know, our macro that we were dependent on was formations and small business starts. The reason was because our top of funnel was exclusively focused on driving n ew customers who just started a business. So when you think about some of these new products that we're building right now, let's take our Compliance Concierge product. Historically, what we were doing was we were selling someone a formation and then attaching a compliance product, because that's all we could do. That was the only value that we had. Now, with a true DIFM suite of compliance products, we go to existing customers and sell them compliance, so we can upsell and cross-sell. We can go to partners and leverage those partner channels, whether, you know, it's with one of our existing partners or a new partner and say, "You have existing small businesses that we weren't able to penetrate into before because they've already incorporated. Now, we have a suite of products that will make their lives easier, will be robust across the board, and where you can earn a bounty." And that's just on compliance. That changes our macro from being solely about small business formations to being about small business longevity and success. But moving more into consumer is another good example. You know, right now, we have a relatively small Trust & Will set of products. Yeah. That suite's largely transaction. As we move that to subscription, that is yet another macro. So what we're trying to do is diversify across multiple macros, so we're protected from risks of, you know, cyclicality and seasonality. Sure. It keeps us more insulated. And so how are we merchandising our products? So as we move from a macro to subscription, so completely understood, and we have a good amount of subscribers already- Yep A good amount. Everyone, the brand is very well known, and so you need the products to sort of decouple from a macro. So talk to us about the merchandising. So the compliance. I love the concierge comment earlier. But how do we, how does LegalZoom better enable users to say, "Ah, yes, I would like this product," or the merchandising of it all? So it's interesting. It starts before we productize, before we package, before we market, with education, and is one of the things that I think we have gotten better at, and will start to excel at. It's a filtering process. Sure. Rather than enabling the customer to filter themselves, what we're now doing is we're pushing education their way, so that they can make informed decisions, and they can understand what it is that they're about to embark on. How are you pushing it their way? So we're doing it in a multifaceted manner. So if you look online at our website, we're now orienting people to the areas where we think they will succeed best. Okay. Not necessarily the cheapest product, not necessarily the most expensive product, but where they will succeed based on the category, based on their longevity, based on their experience. We're working with AI right now. You know, we see the same risk that others see in AI, but for us, it is a far more exciting opportunity than it is risk. Rather than just marketing through, you know, through performance marketing and Google and SEO, leveraging AI helps to expand our addressable market. The TAM opportunity, particularly in legal, with AI versus search, is enormous, if you think of it as a way to educate your customers. Most customers, when they go and they think about searching for something, don't realize initially that they have a legal problem. With search, you're gonna get a result that is based on the query that you give. Yeah. With AI, you're gonna get a result based on a question-and-answer interface, and what we're seeing is that's actually a TAM expander for us. So it is one of the reasons why we decided to start collaborating with OpenAI and Perplexity, because what they are doing for us is opening up the TAM, and there is a last-mile problem in AI, like there is with all technology, and we solve that problem in legal, and we can solve it for SMBs more broadly, which is when you need that human interaction, when you need that expertise, when intelligence fails to deliver expertise, and you need to do a handoff, you need a company that is as versed on the technology side as they are on the knowledge worker side. Lawyers and law firms can't do the technology piece, and the technology-only providers can't and don't want to do the service piece. Sure. We do both. That, that's a great way to say it, and I think having that interactivity with an agentic approach, you can get to the bottom line of what people are looking for, as opposed to links that may not go anywhere. Oh, 100%. You don't know where that goes. Let's talk about your Perplexity, and I think we announced partnerships with Perplexity, with OpenAI. I think we have DocAssist as a new tool. Yep. So, where are we today on these tools? I think we're awfully early And then, say, a year from now, we're sitting here, what are we talking about? Yeah. I hope we're at one one-hundredth of a percent of where we can be. I believe that there's that much opportunity here. Sure. You know, I would argue that a lot of what we are doing is testing and signaling. We're open for business. We're leaning in aggressively. You've got the largest players in AI wanting to work with us because they see the same problem on their end that we see, which is that last mile of when you need that human interaction. Yeah. And we're inserting both product and partnership to fill that gap. Very early, you know, OpenAI, we announced, you know, less than a month ago, and Perplexity not much before that. We're testing and feeling our way through it. The one thing we're not doing is giving out data. ... So that was the next question, so why do Perplexity and OpenAI want to partner with LegalZoom? Why does LegalZoom want to partner with- They're doing it because ultimately they'll fail their customers if they don't. They don't have that deeper knowledge. The deeper knowledge and the ability to connect in our cases with a lawyer. You know, a lawyer, a paralegal service rep. Because even when you look and prepare a document, say a will, with you know with ChatGPT, you know, for example, and it looks good, and you say, "Wow, they do a pretty good job," you're doing that as a researcher. Yeah. When you do it as a human being, and you then print it, and you hand it to your spouse and say, "Let's sign it and put it in a safe," the next thing you do is say, "I want to talk to someone, 'cause I don't know what that word means. I don't understand that paragraph. I don't know if we're doing it in the right state, and I don't know if dear Aunt Betty is the right person to be giving my cat to." So, the reality is, they're getting that feedback themselves, and they realize that we solve that problem- Yeah With a smile on our faces. We're doing it because they're opening up TAM for us. We've got customers that didn't realize they had a need for legal services, service, that are going on OpenAI and Perplexity and others, and saying, "Wow, I didn't realize that was even a legal question that I was asking. I better talk to someone," and you know, and their choice is gonna be talk to a lawyer that's gonna be $1,200 an hour or a $10,000 flat fee, or for, you know, $1,000, all you can eat, you'll get to work with LegalZoom, who is technology-enabled, but will also complete that last mile, and when and where you need to talk to someone, we'll have someone available for you. That's great, so a year from now, one one-hundred-thousandth of the way there, right? We have a long way to go, but a huge opportunity. Understood the macro and the subscription. Let's talk about a pretty interesting change that we had earlier in the year with the Formation Nation acquisition. Yes. So we're about six months into this. Still early days, but we're starting to see the benefits. And so walk us through just the vision here, and more tactically, sort of the integration and the change to the business. And then, Noel, from an M&A standpoint, have you get involved here, and sort of like how you view the M&A sort of deal strategy. But maybe, Jeff, let's start with you. You know, talk to us about the vision and more tactically with- Yeah, and I'll answer that through the lens of those three strategic pillars- Yeah Because it fits perfectly, which is why this has been such a successful acquisition, that and we bought right. It was an accretive deal. Yeah. I'll start with the addressable market point. We were devaluing our brand at LegalZoom by selling transactions and going downmarket and selling free formations. It wasn't what we should be representing with LegalZoom. LegalZoom should be the premium in the space that is offering value relative to lawyers. Instead, we were competing with secretaries of state. Yeah. In part, we bought so that we had a second brand, so that we didn't lose that market, we didn't cede it to competitors, but we didn't dilute our brand value. Second, from a subscription standpoint, this business was predominantly transactional. It looks like LegalZoom did eight, 10 years ago. Interesting. Which means we know what we can do over the medium and long- term to port those customers over to be a subscription-oriented business. And then from this notion of augmented intelligence, AI with human expertise, they were sitting on 120 experts. These are reps and, you know, customer service people who are each and every day solving problems for customers. And, you know, we effectively inherited that for free. So that was the core reason. And, we're now six months in. It's hit your three pillars. And then some- Yeah Although even there, early innings. We, you know, we have been slow to push them on the subscription side. Okay. I would say we're lightest there. On the AI and service side, we've been really quick. In fact, you know, one of their expert centers is now exclusively focused on LegalZoom customers. Right. Right. And the addressable market situation, it happened day one, meaning we were in a, you know, in a long-term M&A deal with them, and felt right, looked right, and we started to reorient our marketing efforts even before we closed, which is great. So two out of the three. Yeah. The third, you've gotta get right. Having done a lot of subscription optimizations in my career, you wanna be measured in terms of how fast you move. Sure. And Noel, on the build versus buy- Yeah Or as you evaluate M&A, what are the criteria that the team looks at? Yeah, I mean, I think first and foremost, it's important that you put yourself in a position to be able to do that analysis, right? And we have developed a really strong balance sheet. We have over $200 million of cash on the balance sheet. We're debt-free. We're generating strong free cash flow. So that gives us a lot of flexibility. On the build side, it's more of a narrow scope. You know, first we look at what do we need to fund the business organically? We feel like we're resourced in a way right now that we are funding some of the initiatives that Jeff just talked about within our existing resourcing envelope. and we're driving efficiencies in the business that are helping us to reallocate resources to do that. On the sort of the buy and partner side, a little broader, where, you know, build kind of narrow focus, core legal services, this, we'd look at adjacencies, right? If there's something that our customers need, that we're not providing today, then that's something we would look at. Customer acquisition, right? Something even in our space, like t he Formation Nation, we spend a lot of money with the Googles and the Metas, you know, to acquire customers. Yeah. This is another opportunity to acquire customers, and you know, we're definitely focused to Jeff's earlier point, on things that, you know, once we realize the synergies, will be accretive to our business, so we're being, you know, smart with our dollars as well. That's great. Do you think are you constantly looking for acquisitions, or are we digesting Formation Nation? Like, how do we think about it? No, there's—we have an active pipeline. We're out there having lots of conversations. There's lots of activity. So we feel like we don't need to necessarily do something, but if we find something that checks all the boxes, we're gonna be opportunistic- Sure And lean into it. And we look at Formation Nation as, you know, a successful indicator on how we might go about it. Got it. Perfect. That, that's really helpful. Yeah. Let's dig in a little bit more on the do it for me approach. Sure. You know, Compliance Concierge, that was certainly highlighted. I think we're testing four other premium services that are Do It For Me products. Would love just the strategy and the roadmap or like just the strategy, like, why are we talking about do it for me now? And I think your answer is moving upmarket. But, talk to us about the journey to get to DIFM? Sure. Right? And then, any insights on what these four other products might look like? You bet. And you nailed the answer in your question, right? It, you know, the need to move upmarket is critical. We have always known that as a company. But the way in which we did it was through a funnel approach, which meant we started at formation, and then we moved with our customers upmarket. The problem is you've got a throughput problem if you do that. There are north of 30 million businesses that are already in existence here in the U.S. If you can't actually penetrate into those businesses, what you end up with is a market of new businesses that are quite small, and risky. You know, the vast majority are returned in the first year, are businesses that go out of business. Sure. It is still worth it to play in that market if you have a good filter, because you don't wanna take a business's money and make it more punitive and harder for them to- Right to actually survive. So the idea is, in some respects, to use this to self-select. A business at the start who wants us to do something for them, as opposed to them doing it themselves, says that: My time is worth more than my money right now, which means they have a viable, likely going concern. It is the same thing that we see when we look at businesses 12 months out that have survived that most difficult period, which is you see, you know, time inelasticity going way down and price inelasticity going way up, meaning they're, you know, they're willing to open up their wallet if you can save them time on things that they don't get value out of. That's where DIFM comes in. That's where these concierge-level products become so critically important, and it's also a market that no one serves in the middle. You see it at the extremes, which is DIY on one end and then full service on the other. Very few people, especially in the legal tech and legal space, are doing these technology-assisted expert models. Yeah. So, you know, as we got in and we started looking at the real opportunity, I was jaded because I came here because of AI, because I saw the tremendous opportunity that we could leverage AI in a way where we couldn't unlock technology for anything other than pure automation before. But, you know, the exec team sort of sat there and said: "How do we take advantage of this? How do we capitalize on it?" You know, we realized if we can take our 1,200+ lawyers, our, you know, thousand footprint or so sales and service force, and we can double, triple, quadruple their capacity and throughput, that type of unlock allows us to drive margin expansion and do so by driving better results and value to our customers. You know, that's where we came up with, you know, the Compliance Concierge product. Yeah. We, you know, we started testing. I'll I'll give you one more teaser for a product I actually don't like because it's transactional, or at least it's reoccurring, not recurring. We have a Dissolution Concierge product. We realize that there are a lot of successful entrepreneurs who start a business, it hard fails, and then the business just sits out there- Yeah Because they don't have the time. They're thinking about their next business, to actually shut it down, but they're accruing fees and taxes and all kinds of penalties. They, they don't want to use a DIY service, and they definitely don't want to spend ten thousand dollars on a lawyer. It turns out they want to spend a few thousand dollars with LegalZoom to do it, because, again, we have more demand than we have supply, because we don't want to be doing a lot of work on the transaction side for a company going out of business. We also know that these are the ones who are gonna start businesses, which is why we did it. But it just shows you that in every, you know, in every facet of business, there are compliance and legal needs that we can serve our customers better as they grow. The four, as we see newer products come on, they'll be sort of the concierge, like, help me do X- Yes Help me do this. Reinstatement's another one- Yeah, it's a great one. ... that we talked about, right? Where- That's the inverse. Yeah, exactly. Customers that have gotten out of compliance, but aren't aware of it, we let them know, and, you know, they essentially, they say: "Hey, I want to get back in compliance. Can you help me? Can you do it for me? I want to continue to run my business." And that leads to, you know, a product that helps them get reinstated, but then an ongoing relationship in managing their compliance for them moving forward. Yeah. And Ron, we even talked in a couple of weeks, so there's more than four? All right, that's exciting. The reality is that- Noted. Yeah It's true, right? We're doing rapid deployment to see what works and what doesn't. Okay. Even things as simple as, like, automated annual reports. The amount of companies that don't even file an annual report as an SMB is huge, and those are real fines in states that require it. We've done a very good job of telling people to file an annual report. Doesn't mean they actually file the annual report. Sure. Yeah. So even with our DIY compliance products, you see a large number of people who never filed. Now we're able to actually say, "We're going to do this for you. We're gonna charge you more." And that's also gonna drive engagement and reduce churn. So tech when you want it, human support when you need it. Sounds familiar? Yes. In the new brand- Yep The new brand campaign? Yeah. New tagline or whatever. I think that rings true to everything we were just talking about here. Talk to us about the goals here, and specifically, like, what... It's sort of like a reintroduction of what LegalZoom is doing as we go up the stack or up the funnel a little bit here. So tell us a little bit more about the new brand campaign, about the new LegalZoom. What else is coming out of it? Would love to hear how we hear more about this in trade and everywhere else. Yeah, and it's interesting. The new LegalZoom is also the old LegalZoom. I'm following in the footsteps of, you know, my predecessors like, you know, like Dan Wernikoff- Yeah And John Suh, and Brian Liu, and Brian Lee. They all had the right vision, and they all were successful in their own right. We're just reorienting and repackaging based on things that we can achieve now that we couldn't then. They had the vision, thankfully, because I can barely see in front of my feet, so I don't have that vision. Yeah. But I don't mind borrowing and Of course From, you know, from these guys who were great. So, you know, step one is reorienting to take advantage of the latest technology, which is artificial intelligence, and being able to integrate that with our experts. Move that model out, this, you know, augmented intelligence in legal. There is no reason that step two couldn't be: prove that now outside of legal. If we can show that we can dominate in a world where we combine experts and AI, there's no reason we can't do that in other spots, in spaces as well. Sure. You know, while that is longer term and more visionary or aspirational, you know, we will earn that right as we demonstrate that we can do this better and more effectively than others and demystify kind of this notion that with service comes cost and comes margin compression, right? We're not, we're not seeing that. Yeah. In fact, if anything, we're accelerating margin by driving expertise into our products. That's great. And so, this is launching now or coming out in the fall, the new campaign? It. It's already launched. The brand's out there now. Yep, yep. And so I think we're seeing early proof points on traffic, but maybe you know, talk to us how we might be better tracking or seeing the results of this campaign. Yeah, we're super excited with the results t hat we're seeing thus far. It launched it in the second quarter. We started to see improvements in direct traffic to site, branded searches, great indicators that it's working. We did this within largely within the spend envelope. Okay. So, we're pulling back on some of our performance spend, spending into brand, so really optimizing across channels. And so, while back half of Q2 and into the start of Q3, we really started to see some improvements in traffic trends, and also, very importantly, improvements in return on ad spend in aggregate. Yes. Generally, when you're launching new brand campaigns, it's a little bit of a slower return profile. To see that happen pretty quickly in the aggregate profile was really reassuring in that we've kind of gotten to a more optimal mix across channels. Yeah. We have to remember, I mean, you know, the company spent over $1 billion branding- Yeah This business. And, you know, LegalZoom is a pretty indelible brand right now. So we're, to some extent, punching below our weight operationally and need to grow into our brand. Most people I talk to have heard of LegalZoom. Yeah. You know, and what it stands for is pretty potent, so we're leaning back into that. That's great. We have about five, six minutes left. Any questions in the audience before I move on? About promotions, in terms of acquiring customers. I have that, 'cause I was looking at my credit card recently, offered with LegalZoom, and I was like, "Oh!" I know them. So what do you think about, you know, promotions, just generally, but also from a quick perspective? So it's an important component, and, you know, we look at that in the same way that we look at partnerships, our brand campaigns, our performance marketing, AIO. It is both important to have diversification, so you're not dependent. You know, too many companies are just dependent on Google search. So reducing that dependence is really important, A, and B, you know, promotions, if you have the right fit, you know, someone like an Amex, who we've worked with for, you know, for quite a long time, you have that right fit. We work with Citi, too. We'll talk about that afterwards. You're building both brand identity, right? 'Cause you're drafting off of a strong brand that speaks and resonates to your customers, and also driving performance. We've leaned in more heavily in terms of promotion and sponsorship, and in direct partnerships for driving business to us, than I think we have probably ever in the past. Maybe as a follow-up to that, let's talk margins here. Well, so, guidance, we raised 2025 revenue guidance, I think, because of the mix shift to subscriptions and greater visibility, but margins sort of stayed the same, around 23%, I feel. So would love to hear, you know, the focus on growth, the focus on investments, and then as we think about margin expansion, maybe in the shorter- term, we're investing in growth here. But talk to us about how you think about margins longer- term. Yeah. So we're super excited about the performance year- to- date and kind of our forecast for the year and being able to take up our revenue guidance, and obviously with the higher revenue expectation and, you know, reiterating our margin target from an absolute EBITDA standpoint, we expect to drive more than we had laid out initially. So all good things. There's lots of work that we're doing around infrastructure. We've made a lot of infrastructure investment over the last five years. You know, we're leveraging AI now to help drive efficiencies, so we're still in that middle innings of some of the efficiencies that we think we can generate within the business. So that helps us. That gives us some visibility and some confidence into leverage moving forward. We've been really focused on balancing growth and margins. Margins, you know, were in the single digits just a few years ago, and we're, you know, the last couple of years, I think this year, our target is increasing margins by a point. Yep. It was four points from the, you know, the prior year. So we've been on a steady course. So definitely think taking a balanced approach to it. We want to try to, you know, reaccelerate revenue growth. You're seeing that now, but maintaining that margin profile. And so as I said before, a lot of it we're solving within the existing resource base, and so that creates some natural leverage as we grow the top line. Now that we have that margin, I mean, solidly in the 20% range, you know, I think LegalZoom does have a buyback in place already. Wanted to understand just the capital allocation strategies as you balance, you know, the cash balance, the investing in the business, potential M&A a nd of course, the return to capital. Yeah, I think the investing in the business, we talked about, kind of check. There, there's no big sort of near-term investment that we see that's needed to continue on the path that with the initiatives that we have today. As we think about M&A, we like the flexibility of having, you know, this amount of cash- Yeah on the balance sheet so that we can be opportunistic. And then, you know, we've been doing some buybacks. We at this level, we expect to continue to be doing that, a little more moderate relative to what we did in prior year, but we expect some consistency because we are generating plenty of free cash flow, and we do feel like we have a sufficient amount of cash on the balance sheet. So that we expect that to be a continued part of our overall capital allocation. That's great. Last question. Any other last call for questions in the audience? All right. Well, Jeff, Noel, anything else we should talk about, or I mean, we covered a lot. No, I think it was great. It's eye-opening on a lot of things. We're excited- Yeah ... if it's not clear. Yeah. Hopefully, that's at least what- Most definitely. Yeah. Great. Jeff, Noel, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks, Ron. Great. Appreciate it. No pleasure.