CS Disco Inc

NYSE:LAW

Earnings Call Analysis

Earnings Call Transcript 2024-Q2

[Operator]

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to CS Disco's second quarter of fiscal year 2024 conference call. [Operator Instructions]

I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Head of Investor Relations, Aleksey Lakchakov. So go ahead.

[Aleksey Lakchakov, executive]

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us on today's conference call to discuss the financial results for Disco's second quarter of fiscal year 2024. With me on today's call are Eric Friedrichsen, Disco's Chief Executive Officer; and Michael Lafair, Disco's Chief Financial Officer.

Today's call will include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including, but not limited to, statements regarding our financial outlook and future performance, the impact of changes to our executive leadership, our future capital expenditures, market opportunity, market position, product strategy and growth opportunities, the benefits of our product offerings, and developments in the legal technology industry, including those related to the role of artificial intelligence.

In addition to our prepared remarks, our earnings press release, SEC filings and a replay of today's call can be found on our Investor Relations website at ir.csdisco.com. Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that may cause our actual results, performance, or achievements to be materially different from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements represent our management's beliefs and assumptions only as of the date made. Information or factors that could affect the company's financial results is included in its filings with the SEC from time to time including the session titled Risk Factors in the company's quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2024, filed with the SEC on May 9, 2024, and the company's upcoming quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2024.

In addition, during today's call, we will discuss non-GAAP financial measures. These non-GAAP financial measures are in addition to, and not as substitute for or superior to measures or financial performance prepared in accordance with GAAP. Reconciliations between GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures and a discussion of the limitations of using non-GAAP measures versus their closest GAAP equivalent is available on our earnings release.

And with that, I'd like to turn the call over to Eric.

[Eric Friedrichsen, executive]

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Disco's Second Quarter of 2024 Earnings Call. I'm happy to be here with all of you and to share the results and discuss our go forward strategy and plans for Disco. Since I joined Disco on April 29th, just over 100 days ago, I've had the opportunity to learn about the business, to meet with many of our top customers, and to get to know the people throughout Disco. I am excited to share my thoughts and my reflections. However, first, I'd like to go to viable results.

Total revenue for the second quarter of 2024 was $36 million, up 5% versus the same quarter last year. Software revenue in Q2 was $29.3 million, up 8% over the prior year. This was the fifth quarter in a row of year-over-year growth for our business and a new high watermark for our total revenue. Services revenue was $6.7 million in the second quarter. Adjusted EBITDA was negative $4.7 million or negative 13% adjusted EBITDA margin.

We ended the quarter with 1,449 total customers, $130 million of cash, and no debt. There are many exciting things that I want to discuss this quarter. While our team made considerable progress in sales and product development, our ultimate goal is to accelerate revenue growth and to further strengthen our position in the market. On today's call, first, I will share my observations from my first 3 months at Disco. Second, I will highlight our primary areas of focus and our approach to accelerating revenue growth. Third, I will share some exciting updates on the product front.

From my initial observations, I am more convinced than ever that Disco is a fantastic company with a bright future. I have visited all of our offices across the globe and met with many employees in various departments. It is clear that we have high caliber, eager, and talented employees who are dedicated to Disco. We have some of the brightest minds in the legal technology industry who have a strong ambition to deliver the absolute best products and services to our customers. I've also met face-to-face with over 20 customers, mostly from our largest Am Law 100 and corporate customer base.

Hearing directly from our customers has been enlightening. Their appreciation for our solution is evident. They have used competitors' products in the past, which provides them with very valuable reference points. Consistently, customers expressed their love for our product's ease of use, workflow efficiency, speed, and reliability. The love that Disco is a significant improvement over the legacy solutions that they've used in the past.

I heard stories directly from these customers about saving hundreds of hours of work by switching to Disco ediscovery, finding pivotal evidence quickly with Cecilia Q&A, and gaining significant value by leveraging our services team as a true strategic partner. Virtually every customer that I met with, made it clear that they want to do more with Disco. It's clear to me that Disco is in a solid position to make the most of the market opportunity.

So in terms of where we'll focus, it's all about customer focus, operational effectiveness, and cultural improvement. Those are the 3 areas that will drive our revenue acceleration. Becoming a customer-focused organization is absolutely paramount. Over the last few months, we segmented our customer base and began shifting resources to focus the attention on our most important top customers and prospects. We have a platform that's highly valued by legal teams and a services organization that provides world-class experiences and outcomes. However, I heard firsthand from several Disco champions at our largest customers that they need Disco's help in promoting our platform within their organizations.

We're executing on a plan right now to enable our customer champions to do exactly that. Our industry and the problems we solve are complicated. The U.S. and international legal systems and regulations have unique rules and requirements and complex workflows that are solutions or design to address elegantly. Because of the complexity that's inherent in our space, our sales and marketing team needs to be exceptionally well and able to understand the customer's needs, their roles, and the related value propositions.

We're rebuilding our sales enablement function to help do just that. We will improve how we communicate Disco's value, navigate potential objections in the sales process, and sell the entire platform offering, not just the point solution. We're focused on adding high-caliber sales leaders who are experienced and sophisticated account-based enterprise sales motions. We believe that augmenting our existing reps with talent that is experienced in enterprise-level sales will elevate our performance across the board. We've already added several talented quota-carrying sales reps and managers just this past quarter and will be focused on adding additional talent in the coming quarters in line with our plan.

We have started to resource and align our marketing, sales development, and customer success teams to our top customers, which are predominantly big law, corporate, and larger litigation boutiques. Finally, when it comes to customer focus, we are ruling out an account-based targeting strategy to ensure that demand generation is focused on our top account priorities and we're shifting a significant amount of field marketing resources to better support and more focused customer set of events.

We've added key senior roles within marketing this quarter, including a Vice President of Demand Generation to support this initiative. We believe that these changes as well as other initiatives that we're currently working on will drive better experiences and outcomes for our customers and result in more demand for our software.

Next, we need to enhance elements of our internal operations to drive organizational effectiveness and customer outcomes. I am pleased to announce that Richard Crum has joined Disco as our Chief Product Office. I work extensively with Richard at Emburse and he will bring a wealth of experience to Disco from his time leading B2B organizations. Richard is customer-focused and commercially minded and he brings an intense focus and discipline to our product team.

Richard has a long legacy of growing people and aligning cross-functional teams around clear sets of priorities. We're also working to improve the effectiveness of our internal end-to-end business processes and systems, especially if they relate to the quote-to-cash life cycle. These improvements will enable a faster and more scalable approach to sales, improves customer experience, and enhance visibility into the effectiveness of our business decisions. This effort is well underway and is key to scaling our revenue. Customers love our products, and we want to ensure that our operational approach is a tailwind to further winning and growing our customers.

Lastly, cultural improvement is about ensuring that Disco is an enjoyable and rewarding place to work. It's a win-win. Engaged and satisfied employees will better serve our customers who will reward us with more business as a result. We have done significant internal work around culture, including improving our practices to promote a transparent, healthy, and collaborative work environment.

The data showed significant improvement in our culture already, and energy in the Disco hallways is palpable. When push comes to shove, culture starts at the top, and I'm committed to ensuring that Disco builds a remarkable reputation based on integrity, ethics, and respect. As Peter Drucker said, culture eats strategy for lunch. Continuing down our path of building a strong company culture will be a key ingredient in our future success. We have a journey ahead of us to enable this business and it will not happen overnight. We are taking very clear steps in the right direction. Michael will speak more to this. But from a cost perspective, we don't expect a material change to our adjusted EBITDA in 2024.

Now I would like to focus on some customer highlights and the great work our product team has done over the past quarter. I was thoroughly impressed during a recent visit to one of our large Am Law customers. This firm, which has a long-standing relationship with Disco and manages a significant number of matters on our platform, is currently piloting Cecilia Q&A on a complex matter. As a reminder, Disco's Cecilia Q&A is a tool that allows users to use natural language questions about the documents in their databases and receive detailed narrative responses along with specific source citations.

So the customer chose this particular case for the pilot due to its size with over 3 million documents in its subject matter, which was complex and rendered traditional search techniques less precise and less effective. The ability to ask questions and receive responses with documented support was highly appealing to the customer. The case team was impressed with Cecilia Q&A's ability to submit questions and receive responses with references to supporting documents. Effective querying of a large population of documents that led to finding key documents also help the legal team quickly provide their client with initial takeaways and actionable recommendations.

This pilot's early findings demonstrate Cecilia Q&A can be a powerful investigative tool early in a case. In this example, Cecilia Q&A could be leveraged much more effectively than traditional search to prove or refute allegations of generic misconduct. Relying on Cecilia Q&A's ability to understand subtle language, the legal team was able to identify highly relevant documents very early on with a limited number of tailored natural language questions. The legal team is now using these documents to assess potential risks to formulate a broader strategy for the case and to assist the client in making informed decisions.

Next, we are pleased to announce the launch of Cecilia Auto Review now generally available and set to be showcased at the ILTA conference next week. And our testing with top Am Law firms, the results were outstanding. Disco's testing of Cecilia Auto Review on customer data demonstrated review speeds of 3,800 documents per hour over a 24-hour period, equivalent to a 140-person review team working an 8-hour day. And precision and recall metrics, 10% to 20% higher than typical from human reviewers.

Our customers can now leverage this technology and live cases to accelerate their reviews. Firms adopting this technology will revolutionize their workflows, reducing first pass review times from weeks to hours while maintaining or even improving quality. Using natural language to describe tags and documents to be tagged, Cecilia Auto Review offers an efficient and effective solution. We're very excited to bring this powerful technology to our customers.

Cecilia Q&A has shown promising growth in its first 6 months since it's been released. We're seeing positive feedback from our customers, and early indications show a meaningful uplift in software revenue for matters where Cecilia Q&A has been implemented. We already have a number of customers eager to begin using Cecilia Auto review. However, we're cautious that material adoption of these technologies will take time, and we don't anticipate significant revenue impact in the current year.

The heartbeat of our platform remains ediscovery. It is our core offering and ultimately, with the vast majority of our customers care about most today. We are committed to providing the leading solution in the market and reflecting our customers' feedback in the upcoming product releases. In Q2, we had a significant capability release called in-app mass redactions. This is a key ediscovery functionality because it is specifically targeted for large matters and enables users to redact thousands of gigabytes worth of data at once. Lawyers will no longer need to draw redaction boxes over sensitive data, scour documents one by one for sensitive information, and spend expansive hours on this task.

Now information like credit card numbers, social security numbers, addresses, or other specific terms and patterns can be redacted with a simple user interface. This release has been frequently requested and we're excited for our customers to start relying on it.

In summary, it's been a wonderful first 100 days at Disco. We had strong revenue this quarter. Our business is growing. We have over 1,400 satisfied customers and amazing product outcomes. I'm impressed with our team and I'm energized by our customers. We know what we need to do, and we are getting everyone aligned around the same priorities. I am proud of what our team has accomplished over the last few months, and I'm incredibly optimistic about our future.

With that, I'll turn it over to Michael.

[Michael Lafair, executive]

Thank you, Eric. In Q2 2024, total revenues were $36 million, up 5% year-over-year. Software revenues were $29.3 million, up 8% year-over-year. We had some softness in software in April that impacted the full quarter, but we saw improvement in May and June. Services revenue were $6.7 million, down 7% year-over-year. The year-over-year decline in services is due to a decline from strong review usage we saw in Q2 of 2023. In discussing the remainder of the income statement, please note that unless otherwise specified, all references to our gross margin, operating expenses, and net loss are on a non-GAAP basis. Adjusted EBITDA is also a non-GAAP financial measure. Our gross margin in Q2 was 75%.

As we mentioned before, our gross margins fluctuate from period to period based on the nature of our customers' usage. For example, the amount and types of data ingested and managed on our platform. Sales and marketing expense for Q2 was $14.3 million or 40% of revenue compared to 47% of revenue in Q2 of the prior year. The year-over-year decline is predominantly driven by a combination of lower total headcount and redistribution of our investment within sales and marketing. Research and development expense for Q2 was $10.8 million or 30% of revenue compared to 31% of revenue in Q2 of the prior year. We are relatively flat year-over-year with our R&D spend.

General and administrative expense in Q2 was $8 million or 22% of revenue compared to 21% of revenue in Q2 of the prior year. General and administrative expenses were relatively flat year-over-year. Operating loss in Q2 was $5.9 million, representing an operating margin of negative 17% compared to negative 25% in Q2 of the prior year. Adjusted EBITDA was negative $4.7 million in Q2, representing an adjusted EBITDA margin of negative 13% compared to an adjusted EBITDA margin of negative 22% in Q2 of the prior year.

Net loss in Q2 was $4.4 million or negative 12% of revenue compared to a net loss of $6.5 million or negative 19% of revenue in Q2 of the prior year. Net loss per share for Q2 was $0.07 compared to $0.11 per share for Q2 of the prior year.

Turning to the balance sheet and cash flow statement. We ended Q2 with $130 million in cash and cash equivalents and no debt. This included the impact of the $20 million share repurchase program completed in the quarter. Operating cash flow for the first 2 quarters of 2024 was negative $8 million compared to negative $21.8 million in the same period of the prior year.

Turning to the outlook. For Q3 2024, we are providing total revenue guidance in the range of $35.3 million to $37.3 million and software revenue guidance in the range of $29.5 million to $30.5 million. We expect adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of negative $7 million to negative $5 million. For fiscal year 2024, we anticipate total revenue guidance in the range of $143 million to $147 million and software revenue guidance in the range of $118.5 million to $120.5 million. We expect adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of negative $23 million to negative $19 million.

Now I'd like to turn the call over to the operator to open up the line for Q&A. Operator?

[Operator]

[Operator Instruction] Your first question comes from the line of Brian Essex with JPMorgan.

[Brian Essex, analyst]

Maybe for Eric, if you could help us understand like within your customer base, 1,400-plus customers, how many would fall into the large law corporate litigation boutique bucket? And what is the behavior of that customer cohort? Is it growing faster than the rest of the customers? And maybe just to get a sense of the underlying dynamics from -- as it relates to like total customer number that we see?

[Eric Friedrichsen, executive]

Sure, Brian, absolutely. Big law, Am Law 100 customers are the biggest producer of revenue for us. And in fact, if you look at our top approximately 300 customers in general, they generate 75% of our revenue, which is comprised of quite a few Am Law 100 customers in that group.

[Brian Essex, analyst]

So if we look at like the net adds for the quarter, is this a function of the larger customers growing and the smaller customers churning off? Or maybe to kind of put it a different way, like what's going on within the rest of the customer base? And how are you managing the ability to kind of like retain and stabilize that customer base within your customer across the platform?

[Eric Friedrichsen, executive]

Yes. Historically, Disco was all about net new customer acquisition regardless of whether those customers were big customers or small customers or customers with big potential or small potential. It was -- really Disco was acquiring customers kind of at any rate. We've really shifted our focus as we put more focus on managing our largest customers. We've also put focus on acquiring larger customers. And so just like we're managing big law, big litigation boutiques and corporations that tend to have a lot of litigation. We're doing the same thing from an acquisition standpoint. So we're -- as we're acquiring customers very much focused on acquiring the right customers where we think we can add the most value and where we have the opportunity to grow.

[Brian Essex, analyst]

Maybe last one for me. In terms of those large customers, how do you look at that opportunity in terms of attach rate or penetration of those customers? Is your large customer focused primarily on increasing penetration within the installed base or going out for new logo lands?

[Eric Friedrichsen, executive]

Yes. Brian, I'm glad you asked that. We -- I've been in firms over 20 customers over the last 100 days in New York, in Philly, in D.C., in New Jersey, in London, in Dallas and a little bit of everywhere. And consistently, what I've heard from our champions of those customers are that, #1, they love our product. #2, they want to expand the use of our product within their organizations. #3, we don't have as big of wallet share as we might think we have. And #4, they want us to help them expand the platform usage within their firms.

And so that's exactly what we're doing. We've built out a champion enablement approach, and we're focused on expanding our wallet share within our customer base. I should point out, I spent a lot of time in the expense management industry, with concurrent Emburse, and at the ERP industry, with SAP. And in those industries, when you're trying to win wallet share, a lot of times you're actually trying to displace your competitor, and it could be pretty challenging. Those are long sales cycles, those are very complex.

One of the interesting things about our market is that matters begin and matters end, and there might be some disadvantages to that, but there's also some big advantages to that in the sense that we don't have to necessarily win every single matter right away. We have to win the next matter. And once we win the second and the third matter, we get to the fifth or the sixth matter, we start to get some traction. That's where we've got the opportunity to standardize a little bit more and win very large wallet shares within our customer base.

[Operator]

Next question comes from the line of Mark Schappel with Loop City Markets.

[Mark Schappel, analyst]

Hello, this is Mark Schappel with Loop Capital. Eric, a question for you on your second priority of driving operational effectiveness throughout the organization. What was it during your company reviews that caused you to basically bring in a new leader on this front as well as any changes in this area?

[Eric Friedrichsen, executive]

Yes. I think you may be speaking about bringing in Richard Crum, our new Chief Product Officer. Is that correct?

[Mark Schappel, analyst]

That's right. Yes.

[Eric Friedrichsen, executive]

Yes. Okay. Great. Yes. I got to tell you, again, I've been in front of 20 customers. They love our products. They need our help in expanding the use of their product throughout their organizations. And I got to tell you, when I had the opportunity to bring on talent like Richard Crum, I had worked with Richard before at Emburse, he was our Chief Product Officer at Emburse. Richard brings in a very customer-focused mindset. He is extremely commercially oriented. He does a really great job of making sure that cross-functionally people are aligning priorities around the right customer needs. And he's an extremely clear communicator, which is really helpful when you think about the work that we're doing to go expand our wallet share within our customer base. It was just a perfect opportunity. And so that's why I brought Richard on board.

[Mark Schappel, analyst]

And then with respect to the go-to-market changes, we are focusing more on the Am Law 100 customers. That typically requires a little bit different type of sales reps. And maybe you can just talk about the type of rep you're bringing on board to target those customers.

[Eric Friedrichsen, executive]

Yes, you're absolutely right. We've got some great talent here at Disco, and we've been adding to that talent. We hired several new sales reps and leaders within the last few months, and we're continuing to do so. It is a different approach. It's a more enterprise-oriented type of sale. It's important that we have people that understand multiple buyers that understand the legal tech space.

So obviously, we're looking for that type of a profile as we're bringing in new people, but we're also building out our sales enablement function and ensuring that we're enabling all of our sales teams to do a better job at expanding our wallet share within our customer base.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from the line of [ Ian Black ] with Needham.

[Unknown Analyst]

How does the new Cecilia Auto Review differ from your existing Disco review product?

[Eric Friedrichsen, executive]

Yes, that's great, Ian. Auto review, I can't tell you how excited I am about auto review. I mean first of all, generative AI in general is a technology that general counsels at corporations are very excited about. GCs are looking for ways to reduce their cost and to get more efficient, and they're putting some pressure on their outside counsel to find ways to focus on providing legal judgment, but then to reduce costs for areas that require typically less legal judgment. And they believe that technology innovation is one way to get them there.

And then our law firm customers are excited about where AI can take them in their ability to differentiate themselves from their competitors. They look at it not only as an opportunity to potentially get more efficient, but also to be able to very quickly do an early case assessment to be able to give their clients an early perspective on the risks associated with their case or even potentially help them more quickly come up with case strategy. So they look at it as an opportunity to be able to deliver faster outcomes and better outcomes for their clients. And many of our law firm customers want to differentiate themselves.

I think that one of the things that's really important to point out is that lawyers are typically risk-averse. And the way we have designed Cecilia Auto Review is set up to help even the most risk-averse types of lawyers. Every document -- first of all, we can review every single document whereas typically technology-assisted review can't review every single document. But with auto review in the mix, we can review every single document.

Secondly, we have AI services wrapped into -- consulting services wrapped into the product, such that we are helping our clients make sure that they are writing the tag explanations in the right way. And then as the documents get tagged, there is a description for why every single document was tagged based on the tag instructions that were given at the very beginning. And then we're providing precision and recall reporting and metrics, which are 10% to 20% better than human review as part of the process as well.

So it's -- we're very excited about the prospects for Cecilia Auto Review. Obviously, it's very, very early days. But the early testing that our clients have done, the being able to process and review 3,800 documents in an hour, it's pretty optimistic about the future there.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from the line of Brent Thill with Jefferies.

[Luv Sodha, analyst]

This is Luv Sodha on for Brent Thill. Maybe first one for you, Eric, now that you've been at Disco for a few days. Given your time there, what assessments have you made about the opportunity set? And just in terms of improving execution, what are the changes do you need to make besides hiring, obviously, Richard Crum?

[Eric Friedrichsen, executive]

Yes. Thanks, Luv. As far as the observations that I've had so far, I mean, I think the first one I would just say is that I've been to every one of our offices, been to India where we have a very strong cross-functional team that covers many different areas of our business, multiple threats to our New York office, to our London office and then, of course, many trips to our Austin headquarters. We've got really incredible talent that's very well versed in the legal tech industry and an ediscovery specifically, people that care a lot about our customers. And I've been really impressed at how they're working together, got low egos, a lot of collaboration. So that part's obviously very, very positive.

I think there's opportunities for us to add more talent, experienced people who have been there and done it before and helped scale companies from where Disco is today, the multiple hundreds of millions of revenue, and we've begun to do that. And we've done it. I talked about hiring sales leaders and sales reps. We talked about hiring our Chief Product Officer, Richard Crum. We are also in the process of interviewing for a General Counsel and in the process of interviewing for a senior vice president of operations.

And so there certainly are some opportunity to kind of round out the talent, and we're going through that process as we speak. And then we also talked about some of the investments that we're making in processes and systems, things like our quote-to-cash project, building out our customer success team and our sales enablement team. It's incredible how far Disco has come. 1,449 customers, $140 million in revenue, but there's just some things that we are building right now that are going to put us into a position to be able to scale to a much, much bigger company in the future.

[Luv Sodha, analyst]

And one quick follow-up for Michael, if I may. Michael, obviously, you've had a few quarters where you've come in line with the guide. I guess you're pulling some of the second half guide, if you will. Could you just walk us through like what would give you more confidence in getting to a more beat-and-raise cadence in the future?

[Michael Lafair, executive]

Thanks, Luv. I mean I feel really confident about the direction that the business is going. And it changes that have already been put in place and the strategy that Eric outlined in his prepared remarks. In terms of the guide, as we finish each quarter, finish Q1, finish Q2, we have narrowed the range based on -- for the full year based on how our performance was in the first half and also based on our best estimate of where we think we're going to land.

Of course, we would like to do better. I'm also optimistic about the direction of the business, and I feel really good about the strategic direction of the company. And -- but right now, we give the best guestimate on where we think we're going to land, and we did it narrow the range a little bit based on the fact that we're closer to the end of the year.

[Luv Sodha, analyst]

Are you -- just a quick follow-up, sorry. Are you baking in additional conservatism in the second half? Or is it the same philosophy as before?

[Michael Lafair, executive]

It's the same philosophy as before.

[Operator]

And there are no further questions at this time. I will turn the call back over to Eric Fredricson, CEO, for closing remarks.

[Eric Friedrichsen, executive]

Thank you very much, and thanks to all of you for joining our earnings call today and for your continued support and your interest in Disco. Your confidence in us drives our commitment to deliver strong results and sustainable growth. I want to extend my gratitude to our dedicated Disco employees whose hard work and innovation are the foundation of our success as well as to our customers who have been amazing supporters and partners to Disco.

Together, we've achieved significant milestones, and we're poised to capture even greater opportunities ahead. To our investors, your trust and your investment are invaluable. We remain focused on executing our strategic initiatives, driving long-term value and maintaining transparent communication. We look forward to sharing our progress in the quarters to come. Once again, thank you for your time today. Thank you for your unwavering support and have a great day.

[Operator]

Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.