LegalZoom.com, Inc. (LZ) Q1 2026 Earnings Report, Transcript and Summary

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to LegalZoom's First Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Madeleine Crane, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Welcome to LegalZoom's First Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. Joining me today is Jeff Stibel, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Noel Watson, our Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer. As a reminder, we will be making forward-looking statements on this call. These forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of words such as believe, expect, plan, anticipate, will, intend and similar expressions and are not and should not be relied upon as a guarantee of future performance or results. Such forward-looking statements are based on management's assumptions and expectations and information available to us as of today's date. These forward-looking statements are also subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from such statements. 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, Madeline, and thank you all for joining our call. LegalZoom is a different company than it was 2 years ago, more focused, better positioned and increasingly differentiated. We are building a subscription-led AI-enabled platform that serves small businesses across their entire life cycle. Our results this quarter show that the strategy is working. Total revenue growth of 13% year-over-year and adjusted EBITDA of over $36 million, both exceeded our expectations. In 2026, we are focused on 3 core growth levers: one, driving high-quality subscription growth through premium human-in-the-loop offerings; two, scaling customer acquisition through partnerships and AI channels; and three, leveraging AI to enhance the customer experience and to drive efficiency. We are seeing clear traction across each of these areas. Q1 marked our fourth consecutive quarter of double-digit subscription growth, led by strong momentum in our human-in-the-loop offerings. Through these personalized higher-value services, we are strengthening our customer relationships and increasing lifetime value. This is how we've repositioned LegalZoom for more durable growth in an AI-driven market. AI is reshaping the first mile of the customer journey, expanding access and bringing more customers into the market. But at the last mile, where high-stake decisions are made, expert judgment, execution and accountability still matter. That's where LegalZoom is differentiated. Our human-in-the-loop strategy remains central to how we differentiate and where we see some of our most attractive growth opportunities. At a high level, this includes both our service layer, products like registered agent and virtual mail and our expert layer, which now includes legal plans, IP services and concierge offerings. Together, these solutions address higher-value customer needs through a combination of automation and professional guidance, supporting stronger ARPU and lifetime value. In Q1, revenue across our expert-led offerings grew more than 2x faster than our overall business year-over-year and continues to accelerate. The standout performer is our concierge suite, now at over 3x 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. LegalZoom is the only provider offering a fully managed do-it-for-me reinstatement and compliance solution, and demand has consistently exceeded our expectations since launch. We are extending this strategy through curated, high-value formation and concierge bundles sold exclusively through our sales team. These packages combine entity formation with ongoing compliance and advisory services, bringing customers directly into higher-value subscription relationships from day 1. 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 LegalZoom. Moving to our second growth lever. We are continuing to diversify our go-to-market model to make customer acquisition broader and more efficient over time. We've accelerated both the number of partners and the velocity of growth within this channel. In Q1, our expanded partner portfolio drove order volume from partnerships to 10% of total orders, up from 4% a year ago, reflecting both increased scale and higher intent customers. New partnerships include LinkedIn, Chase and our strategic partnership this year with GoDaddy, where LegalZoom is now the sole legal services provider across their ecosystem. We have a strong pipeline of diversified partnership opportunities and expect these to fuel a greater share of high-value customer acquisition in 2026 as we work to diversify our top of funnel. This quarter, we made a deliberate decision to front-load our marketing investment, aligning spend with peak business formation seasonality. That investment delivered. Unaided brand awareness increased 19% year-over-year. Direct traffic to legalzoom.com grew 13%, and conversion remains strong. These are important signals that our brand investments are driving both awareness and higher-value customer acquisition. Our goal is straightforward: meet customers where they are, bring them into the LegalZoom ecosystem and introduce them to higher-value services over time. Importantly, this approach extends to how we are positioning LegalZoom within AI ecosystems. We've long described LegalZoom as the last mile solution in an AI-driven world. In this quarter, we continue to embed ourselves into the platforms where customers are asking questions and making decisions. That includes the LegalZoom Connector for Quad and the LegalZoom ChatGPT formations app, both launched in Q1. While still early, these integrations are strategically important, allowing us to be present at the moment of intent when a small business owner is ready to act. Over time, we believe this will position LegalZoom to capture more high-intent demand and further strengthen our role as the trusted partner to help customers complete their journey. Finally, we are embedding AI across our workflows and reimagining our organization to increase speed, improve quality and drive efficiency. As Noel will detail, we are already seeing tangible impact. 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 is what we believe will continue to set LegalZoom apart. Thank you. And I'll now turn it over to Noel.

Thanks, Jeff, and 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 advisory subscriptions 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 file. 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 EOIR 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 life cycle, 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 1/3, 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 Q4. 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 Q2, 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 to $830 million, representing approximately 8% year-over-year growth at the midpoint. We continue to expect adjusted EBITDA in the range of $190 million to $200 million or approximately 13% growth at the midpoint. For the second quarter, we expect revenue in the range of $203 million to $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 to $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?

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Ella Smith with JPMorgan.

So 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?

Yes. Thanks, Ella. Good to hear from you. Look, we're incredibly excited about what's happening with AI for a couple of reasons. And in effect, we're becoming the execution layer that AI can't replace. We've now launched products into ChatGPT and Cloud, 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 in significant volumes. In large part, it's too early, both because they're trying to figure out how that works as are we. So, 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 the throughput that we're seeing into our business. And 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. And for my follow-up, how do you see ARPU contributing to growth in 2026? You 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 give you more confidence to realize ARPU expansion in 2026 and beyond.

Sure. I mean I can start and then let Noel finish. I mean, if you look, we've had now 2 sequential quarters of ARPU growth, 1% in Q4, accelerating to 4% in this past quarter, and we expect that to continue from a trend perspective. That drives through the entire business. And historically, what we've seen both at LegalZoom and across the ecosystem of SMBs is when you increase value alongside driving higher-priced, better products, you ultimately reduce churn. That's a virtuous cycle for lifetime value. And we've already seen the benefits of that. We've spoken, I think, over the last couple of quarters, in particular, about how our compliance products have seen decreases in churn despite the fact that we're seeing improvement in ARPU. And we're pleased to just start the lapping of concierge right now given that launched about a year ago, and we're pleased with the trends there on retention as well.

Yes. I think you hit the nail on the head. Some of it is driven by some of the pricing initiatives that we took last year and matching kind of price to value. But importantly, we're also seeing 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 2 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.

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

Your next question comes from the line of Patrick McIlwee with William Blair.

My first, just following up on Ella's question on the Cloud 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 initially, I was curious if those were -- if those represented a material portion of that 10% of volumes you talked about coming through your partnership channels.

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

But 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. So, 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. And 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.

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

Yes. So, 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. Year-over-year, we expect spend to be up in the -- for the rest of the but to a lesser extent than in Q1. And we measure it in several different ways. We're heavily performance marketing oriented. So, we're measuring ROAs on a daily basis and making tweaks and adjustments to our bidding strategy. But we're also measuring 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 lend itself to supporting our efforts around channel diversification, things like how we show up in AIO and how we do in terms of our partner channel where we're seeing strong momentum. The brand strength really supports all of those initiatives as well.

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

And I guess one other thing to mention is as we partners, 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. And 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. And there's a lot more flexibility when you're working with a partner on your go-to-market and approaching acquisition as a whole, much more so than we see in traditional search.

Your next question comes from the line of Kishan Patel with Raymond James.

This is Kishan Patel on 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? And 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. And at the risk of overstating, the answer is all areas from the office of the CEO down to anyone taking out the trash, including me. And the reality is we've seen greater throughput almost across the board. We mentioned a handful of things 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 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. And just the ability to use AI as a true partner here is probably more valuable within LegalZoom than it is with most customer -- with most companies because our expertise has to be right. There is no sense of good enough. And we hinted at the progress we expect to be making on the margin side in the back half of the year. So much of that is because of our ability to scale our AI investment and push that down throughout the organization and do it effectively and aggressively. And the final point that I'll bring up is this requires an organizational sea shift as well. And we've embraced that pretty deeply. And because of it, we feel pretty excited and downright confident in our ability to execute.

And it's moving real metrics in the business. We -- I'll reiterate maybe a couple of them that we called out in our prepared remarks. So, for example, on our -- 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 approximately 40% of our chat volume end-to-end and doing it at a TNPS that's on par with our human agents. And then when it does transfer chat, it's increasing the efficiency with 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 identify cross-sell and upsell opportunities. So, as Jeff said, we're really using it cross-functionally and in a way that's directly impacting the customer experience.

Your next question comes from the line of Matt Condon with Citizens Bank.

My first is just on the concierge suite. Great to see that it's doing very well. Just as you think about 2026 and the product road map, how does that really form where you're going to go next with the products? And what can we see coming down the pike here? And my second question is just on partnerships, getting to that 10% volume. How big can this be over time? And what types of partners are you finding that are working really well?

Both great questions. I'll take them and Noel feel free to fill in on anything I missed. 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 first set of renewal cycles. But the most important thing to understand is it's roughly 3x the ARPU of our average product. So, when you look forward, where 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. So, 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 learn from that and integrate some of those learnings. So, our expectation is that is going to grow. We're going to leverage other human-in-the-loop products to push on that motion. And we're going to 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 can keep them longer. It really is a virtuous circle. On switching to the partnership side, 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. And the leaders of that channel, Kathy and Liz have been laser-focused on this for the last 6 to 9 months. You've seen a marked increase in a very short period of time. But mark our words, there's more to come. This is underpenetrated 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. And we can help them. We can help them if they haven't formed, form their business. But 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. So, I think you should expect more to come from us and we want that pressure.

Your last question comes from the line of John Byron with Jefferies.

This is John again for Brent Thill at Jefferies. Actually, I had another question regarding concierge suite. I mean I'm looking at your slide deck, it looks like the list prices are between $1,000 and $1,400 compared to ARPUs like the $260. So obviously, it can be a very big contributor. But just wondering if you can kind of size up the percentage contribution maybe either as an overall business or the subscription business? And also wondering where are you getting the lead gen sources? I mean, I guess you just mentioned it's your base itself. And then a follow-up would be in terms of formation nation sales rep productivity, wondering if there's any -- if you can talk about that and whether the number of reps is growing at all.

Sure. Yes, I'll take the concierge question. It's a continuation. We haven't disclosed the size and scale in part for 2 reasons, both of which we think warrant a bit more time. The first is we are only using leads from our base. And 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 LegalZoom's perspective are. You can imagine over time, once we perfect this, the ability to go out to partners and direct marketing because 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 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 is huge inelasticity, and we've tested it, but we won't pressure test that until we have the product right. Do we want to include lawyers in that product? Do we want to include accountants in that product? How far up the chain do we want to go? Because we know that the more we can offer a customer, the longer they're going to stay, and they are willing to pay for that value if we're providing a strong service for them. So, we continue to tease apart what the different variables of concierge are currently and should be. And so far, we're incredibly pleased. We're seeing incredible growth from that. And when you look at it, it is the predominant driver of our human-in-the-loop growth here, and we expect it to continue to be. So, we're excited, but we think it's premature to discuss the overall contribution. And Noel, I'll let you take that.

Yes. Just on the sales question. So, 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 LegalZoom, in part to support the growth that we're seeing on concierge on the LegalZoom side. And then on the Formation Nation side as we see greater demand, and we're very much tying any incremental hires on the Formation Nation side to an ROI equation and ensuring that there's enough demand to support the incremental hire. And so that's how we're determining when to add sales reps there.

This does conclude the question-and-answer session. Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This concludes the program, and you may now disconnect.