LZ - NASDAQ

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Legal

Thank you, operator. Welcome to Legal

These risks and uncertainties are referred to in the press release we issued today and in the Risk Factors section of our most recent annual report on Form 10-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Except as required by law, we do not plan to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of any new information, future events, or otherwise. In addition, we will also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. We use non-GAAP measures in making decisions regarding our business, and we believe these measures provide helpful information to investors. These non-GAAP financial measures are not intended to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for results prepared in accordance with GAAP.

Reconciliations of all non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures are set forth in our investor presentation, which can be found on the Investor Relations section of our website at investors.legalzoom.com. I will now turn the call over to Jeff.

Thank you, Madeleine, and thank you all for joining our call. Legal

Through these personalized, higher-value services, we are strengthening our customer relationships and increasing lifetime value. This is how we've repositioned Legal

In Q1, revenue across our expert-led offerings grew more than two times faster than our overall business year-over-year and continues to accelerate. The standout performer is our Concierge Suite, now at over three times average ARPU. We are tapping into an underserved market. For example, we estimate that nearly 1/3 of U.S. small businesses are in bad standing or at risk of falling out of compliance each year. Legal

We are excited to see the robust rate of adoption, with customers increasingly opting for higher-tier bundles. These packages support higher ARPU, are driving more durable customer relationships, and reinforce the value of expert-led support. As a result, we are using Concierge not just as a product, but as a strategic entry point to engage more established small business customers, a key long-term growth opportunity for Legal

New partnerships include LinkedIn, Chase, and our strategic partnership this year with GoDaddy, where Legal

Importantly, this approach extends to how we are positioning Legal

Our AI-powered tools are empowering our experts, improving sales effectiveness, increasing customer satisfaction, and allowing us to scale output without proportional increases in headcount. This is translating into real operating leverage and will be an increasingly important driver of our planned margin expansion throughout the year. Stepping back, these initiatives reflect a business that is becoming more durable, more efficient, and better positioned for long-term growth. As we move through 2026, we are executing with clarity and building momentum across each of our growth levers. AI is changing how businesses start, but starting is the easy part. Getting to the finish line is what matters, and that's where we win. We combine technology with real human expertise to solve the last mile, deliver outcomes, and help our customers move forward with confidence.

That combination is difficult to replicate, and it is what we believe will continue to set Legal

Thanks, Jeff. Good afternoon, everyone. Let me connect our growth levers to what you're seeing in the numbers. Our results this quarter reflect continued progress in shifting the business toward higher value, subscription-driven revenue. While a portion of our growth benefited from factors I'll discuss shortly, the underlying performance of the business continues to be strong. At the same time, leveraging AI, we are quickly scaling efficiencies across the business and improving execution through our core workflows, which we expect to be an increasing contributor to margin expansion. With that context, I'll turn to our first quarter financial results. Unless otherwise stated, all comparisons will be on a year-over-year basis. Total revenue was $207 million, ahead of our expectations, reflecting growth of 13%. Subscription revenue increased 12% to $130 million, marking our fourth consecutive quarter of double-digit growth.

Performance was led by the human-in-the-loop services Jeff highlighted, including strength in registered agent services, benefiting from our pricing initiatives implemented last year. Higher revenue from legal plans bundled into certain formation offerings and contributions from virtual mail and our Concierge Suite. We also saw strength in our compliance offering, driven by strong retention from experience improvements rolled out over the past year, including Annual Report Auto-filing. ARPU increased 4% year-over-year, reflecting our strategy to grow higher-value human-in-the-loop offerings. These services drive ARPU expansion and improve overall revenue quality as we aim to increase customer lifetime value. We expect ARPU to be the primary driver of subscription growth throughout the year. As we execute this strategy, we are seeing a decline in lower-value subscriptions previously bundled within the formation package.

As a result, we ended the quarter with approximately 1.92 million subscription units, stable year-over-year, reflecting the continued shift in mix toward higher value offerings. Turning to transactions, revenue increased 15% to $77 million. Transaction revenue benefited from the higher than expected annual report filing activity within our compliance offering. As a reminder, these filing fees are seasonal in nature, with more activity heavily weighted in Q1. Transaction revenue was also driven by strength in trademark and IP offerings as well as a full quarter of contribution from Formation Nation. Growth was partially offset by the expected decline in BOIR revenue. AOV was $205, up 5%, reflecting packaging changes in our formation bundles and the lapping of low value BOIR transactions in prior year.

Transaction units increased 10% to 375,000, reflecting higher annual report volumes as well as growth in business formation volume. We processed 142,000 business formations in the quarter, up 8%, driven by a full quarter contribution from Formation Nation and increased business formation volume from partnerships. Finally, deferred revenue increased $20 million sequentially, reflecting normal seasonality. Turning to profitability, where all metrics are on a non-GAAP basis. Gross margin was 67%, flat year-over-year, driven by more efficient service delivery offset by higher filing fees. Sales and marketing costs were $72 million, or 35% of revenue, up 29%. Customer acquisition marketing increased 25%, reflecting a shift in the timing of investments to align with peak business formation seasonality and diversification of investments in brand and partnerships.

Non-CAM sales and marketing expenses increased $5 million, or 45%, largely reflecting a full quarter of Formation Nation and targeted investments in our sales team, both of which are directly supporting the higher value revenue growth you're seeing in these results. Technology and development costs were $14 million, down 6%. General and administrative expenses were $15 million, an increase of 2%. Across the organization, we are actively managing cost structure and productivity to ensure investments are aligned with higher value growth. This includes leveraging AI, which is fundamentally changing how we operate the business. We are rapidly transitioning to a fully AI-native organization with tools deployed broadly across the company, backed by ongoing training to drive real workflow transformation. We've launched targeted initiatives to redesign workflows and drive efficiencies through year-end and into 2027.

In product and software development, AI is now integrated across the lifecycle, improving engineering velocity and enabling increased output without proportional increases in headcount. We are already seeing tangible results. Across our law firm workflows, AI is driving efficiency gains, reducing trademark classification search time by 55%, accelerating patent drafting by 30%, and automating key processes, resulting in faster turnaround and more efficient use of attorney capacity. Further, AI-powered coaching has reduced missed sales opportunities by roughly a third, enabling our teams to offer more solutions and cross-sell our products. Agentic AI is also handling thousands of customer care chat interactions, fully resolving approximately 40% of inquiries end-to-end. Our operational execution drove adjusted EBITDA of $36 million, representing a margin of 18%. Moving now to our balance sheet and capital allocation. Free cash flow was $41 million, flat year-over-year.

We continue to generate strong free cash flow, maintain a debt-free balance sheet, and our $100 million revolving credit facility is fully undrawn. We ended the quarter with $183 million in cash and cash equivalents, down $20 million from Q four. The sequential change reflects share repurchases and a $13 million payment of deferred consideration related to the Formation Nation acquisition, partially offset by solid free cash flow generation. During Q1, we repurchased approximately 5.3 million shares of our common stock for $43 million. As of March 31, 2026, we had approximately $126 million remaining under our authorization. We have remained active in the market in Q two, a direct reflection of our confidence in the long-term value of the business relative to current valuation. Now turning to our outlook.

For the full year, we are increasing our revenue outlook to a range of $810 million-$830 million, representing approximately 8% year-over-year growth at the midpoint. We continue to expect adjusted EBITDA in the range of $190 million-$200 million, or approximately 13% growth at the midpoint. For the second quarter, we expect revenue in the range of $203 million-$207 million, representing approximately 6% growth at the midpoint. Relative to the first quarter, this reflects the full lapping of our Formation Nation acquisition as well as a reduced volume of annual report filings due to seasonality. We expect adjusted EBITDA in the range of $40 million-$42 million.

In terms of quarterly cadence, we expect adjusted EBITDA to build throughout the year from improved gross margin, disciplined cost management, and AI-driven efficiencies realized in the back half of the year. To wrap up, our first quarter results reflect continued execution against our business strategy, and we look forward to building on our momentum. We have the foundation in place to leverage our differentiated market positioning to drive higher quality revenue growth and margin expansion in 2026 and beyond. With that, we'll open the call for questions. Operator?

Yes, thank you. At this time, we'll conduct the question and answer. To ask a question, you'll need to press star one one on your telephone and wait to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Ella Smith with JPMorgan. Your line is now open.

Good afternoon. Thank you for taking my question, Jeff and Noel. First, you framed AI as a tailwind and have seen some major partnerships in the past few months. How are you seeing the customer acquisition funnel change, and what kind of conversion are you seeing from that kind of customer?

Yeah. Thanks, Ella. Good to hear from you. Look, we're incredibly excited about what's happening with AI for a couple of reasons. You know, in effect, we're becoming the execution layer that AI can't replace. We've now launched products into ChatGPT and Claude, both of those launched in Q1. We've started expanding our partnerships with them and the reach that we're driving to address and attack the additional incremental traffic that's coming from these AI engines. What we're not seeing, I don't think anyone is seeing right now, is traffic coming directly, you know, in significant volumes. In large part, it's too early, both because they're trying to figure out how that works, as are we.

What we're doing is we're embedding products, we're embedding their AI intelligence into what we're doing, and that's helping to drive, you know, the throughput that we're seeing into our business. You know, the thing that's encouraging for us is what that's allowing us to do is drive incremental formation volume that is coming from higher value customers and lifting ARPU up.

Very clear. Thank you, Jeff.

Yes.

For my follow-up, how do you see ARPU contributing to growth in 2026? You've said that it's going to be an important driver. I was curious if you or Noel could walk us through the customer trends and sentiment that you're seeing that gives you more confidence to realize ARPU expansion 2026 and beyond.

Sure. I mean, I can start and then let Noel finish. I mean, if you look, we've had now two sequential quarters of ARPU growth. 1% in Q4 accelerated to 4% in this past quarter, and we expect that to continue from a trend perspective. You know, that drives through the entire business. You know, historically, what we've seen both at Legal

We've, you know, we've spoken, I think, over the last couple of quarters in particular about how our compliance products have, you know, have seen decreases in churn despite the fact that, you know, that we're seeing improvement in ARPU. We're pleased to, you know, just start the lapping of Concierge right now, given, you know, given that launched about one year ago. We're pleased with the trends there on retention as well.

Yeah. I think you hit the nail on the head. You know, some of it is driven by some of the pricing initiatives that we took last year. We're matching kinda price to value. But importantly, we're also seeing, you know, a shift in customer mix as we drive more customers towards our higher value human-in-the-loop offerings like Concierge. So it's the combination of those two things that's really driving ARPU, and we see it as a sustainable driver of revenue growth throughout the rest of this year and beyond.

Yeah. The only thing I'll add is it's what gives us confidence in our raised revenue guide because this, you know, this is a roll forward exercise. You can see those improvements compounding in the, you know, in the organic business.

Perfect. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Patrick McIlwee with William Blair. Your line is now open.

Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. My first, just following up on Ella's question on the Claude, OpenAI, and Perplexity partnerships. It sounded like, Jeff, you said those were not driving a material amount of your traffic at this point. Can you just confirm that first of all? Because, you know, initially, I was curious if those represented a material portion of that 10% of volumes you talked about coming through your partnership channels.

Yeah. It's too early for it to be material at this point. You know, this is still test and learn. We are seeing material increase in our partnership channel broadly, and you know, we talked about that in the prepared remarks. You know, that 10% growth is disproportionately coming from the partnerships around GoDaddy, Chase, LinkedIn, and others, and we're gonna continue to accelerate that. You know, with these new traffic channels through AI, it really is just too early for it to be a significant driver.

What's important there is that strategically, we positioned ourselves as the brand and the player that these AI companies are looking to work with when they're looking to work with somebody in the legal services space. It's strategically important for us to be there, and obviously, we all expect that this will evolve and become much more significant over time.

It's probably the most important point, so I'm glad you brought that up, Noel. I mean, we are effectively the de facto choice for legal services across AI. You know, we're pretty excited about that, and I think it's in part because of our brand, it's in part because of our product, and it's in part because of our 25-year history.

Okay. Understood. Last quarter you talked about leaning into the positive formation environment early this year with some incremental CAM and, you know, we definitely saw that come through this quarter. Obviously seems like that yielded the intended results with the top line performance and also some implied share gains on the formation front. My question is, can you talk about how you evaluate the ROI on that CAM as we look further into the year? You know, what channels you're leaning into and how your spending plans have evolved, if at all, since last quarter?

Yeah. We clearly and intentionally spent up into a stronger environment, but also to get our brand messaging across in Q1. We're expecting that to continue, but to a lesser extent. You know, year over year, we expect spend to be up for the rest of the year, but to a lesser extent than in Q1. We measure it in several different ways. You know, we're heavily performance marketing oriented, so we're measuring ROAS on a daily basis and making tweaks and adjustments to our bidding strategies. We're also measuring it in intangible ways, things like unaided brand awareness, which we mentioned in our prepared remarks, where we saw a marked improvement in unaided brand awareness in the quarter as we surveyed it.

As we know that this will, you know, lend itself to supporting our efforts around channel diversification. Things like how we show up in AIO and how, you know, how we do in terms of our partner channel, where we're seeing strong momentum. The brand strength really supports our all of those initiatives as well.

Make no mistake, the point we're making, the positioning we're making is we are the choice. There shouldn't be alternatives. You know, that's one of the reasons why, you know, we're pushing towards these exclusive relationships with other small business channels that have great existing and established small businesses.

I guess one other thing to mention is, you know, as our partners, you know, we think that's just a great strategic opportunity for us. It does take some investment upfront to onboard them and start to scale them up. We have clear plans that we engage in to optimize those over time. It gives us not only the opportunity to drive customer acquisition that's new formation, but for us to start to roll out initiatives that target established businesses within those partner bases. You know, there's a lot more flexibility when you're working with a partner on your go-to-market in approaching acquisition as a whole, much more so than we see in traditional search.

Thanks, Noel, and thanks, Jeff. Another nice quarter here.

Thank you.

Thank you. Your next question comes to the line of Kishan Patel with Raymond James. Your line is now open.

Hi, this is Kishan Patel. I'm for Josh Beck. How are you thinking about utilizing AI internally as a way to grow number of SMBs managed per expert or concierge manager while maintaining your service levels? What areas of the business are furthest along today?

Great question. We're not thinking, we're doing, and we've seen tremendous progress here. At the risk of overstating the answer is all areas from, you know, from the office of the CEO down to, you know, anyone taking out the trash, including me. You know, the reality is we've seen greater throughput, you know, almost across the board. We mentioned a handful of things on, you know, on the side of customer service. We've talked in the past about what we're able to do with concierge reps and expanding throughput there. Legal services, we're having, you know, a great deal of success with our owned and operated law firm, and we're starting to push that out to our network in terms of understanding there.

Just the ability to use AI as a true partner here is probably more valuable within Legal

Because of it, we feel pretty excited, you know, and downright confident in our ability to execute.

It's moving real metrics in the business. I'll reiterate maybe a couple of them that we called out in our prepared remarks. For example, on the legal side, in terms of servicing our customers, we saw a 55% reduction in trademark search classification time and a 30% increase in efficiency around drafting patents. On our customer care side, AI is now handling 40, approximately 40% of our chat volume end-to-end and doing it at a, you know, a tNPS that's on par with our human agents.

When it does transfer chats, it's increasing the efficiency with which the human agents can bring that to closure. On the sales side, we're using it in terms of onboarding sales reps more quickly and providing on-call guidance that's helping to identify cross-sell and upsell opportunities. As Jeff said, we're really using it cross-functionally and in a way that's directly impacting the customer experience.

Thanks very much.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Thank you. Your next question comes on the line of Matt Condon with Citizens Bank. Your line is now open.

Great. Thank you for taking my questions. My first one is just on the Concierge Suite. Great to see that it's, you know, doing very well. Just when you think about 2026 and the product roadmap, like how does that really, you know, form where you're gonna go next with the products and what could we see coming down the pike here? My second question is just on partnerships. Getting to that 10% in volume, how big can this be over time, and what types of partners are you finding that are working really well? Thank you so much.

Right. Both great questions. I'll take them, and Noel, feel free to fill in on anything I miss. Concierge has been a great success. Obviously it's early. It's a recurring revenue product, typically annual, so we're just getting through the, you know, the first set of renewal cycles. But you know, the most important thing to understand is it's roughly three times the ARPU of our average product. When you look forward, where are we headed? To drive ARPU higher and higher, so that we have enough margin to add greater and greater value to ultimately reduce churn and extend lifetime value.

This has been a tremendous success, and we're now leveraging some of that success to go back into our other products like our legal plan products, business advisory, as an example and, you know, and learn from that and integrate some of those learnings. Our expectation is that is going, you know, that is going to grow. We're gonna leverage other human-in-the-loop products to, you know, to push on that motion. And, you know, we're gonna leverage more and more experts at greater and greater scale as we integrate both human and artificial expertise using AI to give us both a margin boost but also drive ARPU further up the curve while adding value for our customers so that we keep them longer. It's, you know, it really is a virtuous circle.

Switching to the partnership side, you know, the partner channel I think is an area of missed opportunity in the past and something we have spent a huge amount of time investing in. You know, the leaders of that channel, Kathy and Liz, have been laser-focused on this for the last six to nine months. You've seen, you know, a marked increase in a very short period of time, mark our words, there's more to come. You know, this is under-penetrated because anyone who has access to, has built relationships with, has a trusted relationship with a small business audience, we should be working with them. We can help them. We can help them if they haven't formed, form their business.

More importantly, if they have, through Concierge products, through legal plans, through compliance offerings, and these are all things that are native to what we do, but that we haven't offered outside of our platform. Even Concierge, we're still in that test phase such that we've been selling only to our customers. Opening that up to other partners is a really exciting avenue. I think you should expect more to come from us, and you know, and we want that pressure.

Thank you.

You bet.

Thank you. Your last question comes to the line of John Byun with Jefferies. Your line is now open.

Hi, thank you. This is John Byun for Brent Thill at Jefferies. Actually, another question regarding Concierge Suite. I mean, I'm looking at your slide deck, and it looks like, you know, the list prices are between $1,000 and $1,400 compared to your ARPU is on your $260, so obviously it can be a very big contributor. Just wondering, you know, if you can kind of size up the percentage contribution maybe either as overall business or for the subscription business. Also wondering where are you getting, you know, the lead gen sources?

I mean, I guess you just mentioned it's your base itself, but, a follow-up would be in terms of Formation Nation sales rep productivity, wondering if you can talk about that and whether the number of reps is growing at all. Thank you.

Sure. Yeah, I'll take the Concierge question. It is a continuation. We haven't disclosed the size and scale in part for two reasons, both of which we think warrant a bit more time. The first is we are only using leads from our base. You know, to your specific question, John, that means we're looking at that base of customers. We're checking whether they're in compliance or not in compliance, whether they need to be reinstated and what the direct needs from Legal

You can imagine over time, once we perfect this, the ability to go out to partners and direct marketing because we'll, you know, we'll be able to help people get banking relationships, get insurance they might not have been able to get otherwise, get off personal guarantees by helping them, you know, become and maintain compliance over the long run with these Concierge products. The second is we haven't perfected the product itself yet. We're still looking at pricing. We think that there's huge inelasticity, and we've tested it, but we won't pressure test that until we have the product right. Do we wanna include lawyers in that product? Do we wanna include accountants in that product? How far up the chain do we wanna go?

Because we know that the more we can offer a customer, the longer they're gonna stay, and they are willing to pay for that value, if we're providing a strong service for them. We continue to tease apart what the different variables of Concierge are currently and should be. You know, so far we're incredibly pleased. We're seeing, you know, incredible growth from that. You know, when you look at it is the predominant driver of our human-in-the-loop, you know, growth here. We expect it to continue to be. You know, we're excited, but we think it's premature to discuss the, you know, the overall contribution. Noel, I'll let you take that question.

Yeah. Just on the sales question. For Formation Nation specifically, I think the call-out is that this quarter represents a full quarter of Formation Nation sales costs relative to a partial quarter last year, because we acquired them partway through the calendar quarter. With that said, we are investing in sales both across both of the brands, Formation Nation and Legal

Okay. Thank you very much.

Thank you, John.

You bet.