Donna Penick

LegalZoom wanted to prepare for an initial public offering (IPO), but the state of order and financial data could not support generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) requirements. This project required broad changes to the SQL database structures, internal customer care, fulfillment processes, and the eCommerce website. Payment processing had to change. New .NET applications were needed to support customer care and provide an auditable record of new products and price changes. As everything was so tightly coupled, most of the project had to be deployed simultaneously, with extensive data migration and a hard deadline.

Everything but the website work was outsourced to an offshore company whose owner was an architect and worked in our office for the project’s duration. We identified product owners for the new applications and key stakeholders in each fulfillment team and hired a technical PM. We prioritized everything we could roll out before the main launch and got that done. Detailed deployment planning ensured the rollout went smoothly, and we met our deadline, giving finance the necessary window to prepare the S-1 filing.

The company delayed its IPO twice and went public in June 2021 with a
$7.5-billion valuation.

The executive team wanted to bundle legal subscription services with the legal documents already part of the product suite. Since this affected both Fulfillment operations and Finance, it was more than a matter of simply testing conversion on the website. For each offer tested, the cohort of purchasers had to be specially handled to ensure they received the services paid for and expedited the order if that was part of the offer. The cohort had to be clearly marked so Finance could perform the financial analysis for each offer tested and correctly determine the revenue recognition schedule.

As soon as subscriptions seemed viable, the FileNet fulfillment workflow was extended to include subscription features. The website also was modified to ensure the features available via My Account were accessible with an active subscription and not accessible if the subscription ended.

Personalities were a challenge in this project, but eventually, the business owner for this product line became my favorite business owner to work with.

Subscription products were responsible for 50% of the revenue growth that provided the company with a $5 billion valuation at IPO.

This knowledge management application was conceived by a lawyer who built a working prototype for his own use. He had assembled a part-time development team to move it to AWS and complete the development for launch as a SaaS product.

I was hired as a project manager because the lead developer could no longer manage the work. However, it was immediately apparent that the real need was for a product owner. No single feature was complete or even fully articulated. There were no documented requirements. The UI was grid-based and outdated.

My approach was three-pronged: 1) work with the owner to help him get clarity in this thinking about each feature and capture the requirements as user stories; 2) hire a skilled team that could build the application; 3) apply rigor by implementing Agile processes.

The team was built over time, starting with one senior developer. The team grew to three developers, a QA engineer, and finally a designer, who completely redesigned the application. As soon as full-time developers were on board, we switched to complete Agile.

We supported the virtual American Bar Tech show in March 2021 with a soft launch. Completed the remaining phase-1 features during Q3 2021.

LegalZoom needed to mature its IT processes to take the following steps in growth. There were many challenges, including minimal QA and no development, testing, and staging environments, no release process, and inconsistent use of source control. The developer mindset was process-averse, thinking that the process would hinder rather than help.

I performed a deep-dive discovery to inventory all servers and their contents that comprised the platform and to identify stakeholders and the workflows in each fulfillment team. We then built and tested the environments, enlisting these stakeholders as core team members for testing. We also formed a QA team and created a SharePoint workflow for managing releases.

The developer mindset changed gradually via multiple discussions and some notable failures. Still, persistence paid off, and the result was a more mature process that could support the next step of preparing for IPO.

The agency’s SharePoint team sites were running on obsolete SharePoint and Windows Server versions. Sites were large and stale, and the OCIO had no relationship with the program office stakeholders to engage in the cleanup. A previous failed attempt to build an on-premise server farm and upgrade the team sites had taken 15 months as a waterfall project. Even though moving to SharePoint Online was a far better solution than building new servers on-premises, some management perceived the move to the cloud to be high risk.

The first step was to get executive buy-in to move to SharePoint Online. Next was to identify stakeholders in each program office who could help determine what to keep, archive, or delete. We could archive and delete about half of the 1.5 terabytes of data.

The department had not yet transitioned to Agile. Still, I used a modified Agile approach, grouping the sites into sprints for migration and test by the development team, with user acceptance testing (UAT) and go-live in subsequent sprints. The SharePoint contractor team was energized and excited to be going to the cloud, and we completed the project in seven months.

Researched and selected the vendor, then led the project to internationalize the Oracle PHP platform to handle double-byte characters. Managed the follow-on efforts to localize into German and then Japanese. Worked with the vendor and local and in-country resources to support successful launches in both countries.