Donna Penick

LegalZoom wanted to prepare for the IPO, but the state of order and financial data could not support 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. Because everything was so tightly coupled, most of the project had to be deployed simultaneously, with extensive data migration and a hard deadline.

We outsourced all but the website work 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 that 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 of 2021, with a valuation of $7.5 billion.

The executive team wanted to bundle legal subscription services with the legal documents already part of the product suite. It was no problem to offer variations of subscription services on the website; the challenge was to effect those changes into the fulfillment system so customers got what they had purchased and would lose access to features if the subscription lapsed.

It was not feasible to modify all downstream processes for each iteration of the product offering, so initially, most services were fulfilled manually; a few could be configured for a certain block of time via the product catalog. Until the subscription features were firmly defined, each cohort of purchasers had to be tracked throughout their subscription life to ensure access.

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

Subscriptions now account for 50% of revenue and result in a $5 billion valuation at IPO.

LegalZoom needed to mature its IT processes to take the next steps in growth. There were many challenges: minimal QA and no dev/test/staging environments, no auditable release process, and source control was used inconsistently. The developer mindset was process-averse, thinking that the process would hinder rather than help.

We 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 built 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 versions of SharePoint and Windows Server. The 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 of the 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 identify what to keep, archive, or delete. We could archive/delete about half of the 1.5 TB of data.

The department had not yet transitioned to Agile, but I used a modified Agile approach, grouping the sites into “sprints” for migration and test by the dev team, with 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 7 months.

A software upgrade had been pending for several years with no forward progress, and new OCIO management wanted to move all local data center servers to Azure (IaaS). Challenges were due to limited resources, lack of access to servers, lack of expertise, and frequent interruptions for production support. My main tasks were to convince management that others should step up and learn how to do production support, to obtain training and support from Microsoft for the resources working on the project, to help the primary resource think through technical issues, and to get permission from operations for the primary resource to have extended server access while he was learning how to set up and configure the server farm. The farms were successfully built in the on-premise data center, and the applications were upgraded and run locally until the Azure environment was ready. This was the first success in moving internal customer-facing applications to Azure.

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, local and in-country resources to support successful launches in both countries.