Gov. Perry: LegalZoom to Move Up To 600 Jobs to Austin, TX

AUSTIN – Gov. Rick Perry today announced the state will invest $1 million through the Texas Enterprise Fund (TEF) in LegalZoom.com for the relocation of certain office functions from Los Angeles to Austin. This investment will create up to 600 jobs and more than $11.7 million in capital investment.

“Texas is the best state in the nation for business, thanks to our low taxes, reasonable and predictable regulatory environment, skilled workforce, and incentives such as the TEF, which continues to be an essential deal closing fund for Texas,” Gov. Perry said. “This investment in LegalZoom will bring up to 600 jobs and millions of dollars in capital investment to Austin, and strengthen Central Texas’ economy.”

LegalZoom provides online legal document services including LLCs, incorporations, last wills, living trusts, trademarks, patents and copyrights. The Austin office will include sales positions, order fulfillment, customer service and technical support representatives. LegalZoom plans to begin hiring immediately, and become fully operational in the coming months.

“We’re thrilled with the City Council’s vote and are very excited to move forward with our Austin expansion plans. Since we started in 2000 we’ve been based solely in Los Angeles. So selecting our first location outside of Los Angeles was a very big decision for us, which we carefully considered for over 6 months,” LegalZoom President and Chief Operating Officer Frank Monestere said. “We sincerely appreciate the efforts of Governor Perry, the Austin City Council and Chamber of Commerce in crafting a very attractive incentive package through both the Texas Enterprise Fund and the City’s Economic Development Program. Their hard work and warm welcome were instrumental in our selecting Austin as our second home.”

At Gov. Perry’s request, the legislature created the TEF in 2003 and re-appropriated funding in 2005, 2007 and 2009 to help ensure the growth of Texas businesses and create more jobs throughout the state. TEF projects must be approved by the governor, lieutenant governor and speaker of the House. The fund has since become one of the state’s most competitive tools to recruit and bolster business. To date, the TEF has invested more than $388.6 million and closed the deal on projects generating more than 55,580 new jobs and more than $14.3 billion in capital investment in the state.

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Join the Discussion

6 comments so far.

Gene Quinn
April 20, 2010 09:18 pm
Brian-

Actually, my comments are directed to the LegalZoom self-help model and your reliance on customer service representatives who, in my experience, answer legal questions. The answering of legal questions is the practice of law, and on top of that your customer service representatives get the law wrong, at least in my experience. LegalZoom automated e-mails to clients also contain incorrect legal advice and solicit additional business. You claim you can do things for people, create documents and file them. Your advertising practices promise a lot, including things that seem to me to be the practice of law.

Don’t forget, I know the LegalZoom system because I created it for you. You never wanted a robust and complete system, rather you wanted something no more than 6 questions and without much guidance. You didn’t want it to be robust because it would scare people away. So your focus was on selling rather than providing a good product. I would review the answers and provide voluminous feedback in iterations, so the lack of a robust questionnaire at the front end was covered up by my advice and time working with inventors. Now I am not doing that any more, and many inventors do not receive assistance.

By contrast, the Invent + Patent System is extremely robust. It has 10 questions, sample answer templates, many illustrative example answers to show what the answer should look like and quite a bit of help text built in. The resulting output is 3 pages single spaced, which is unlike the typical 1 to 1.5 page double spaced output of the LegalZoom variant. So you can pretend all you want and grandstand too, but the Invent + Patent System is what you never wanted to use. The self help is real, unlike the watered down variation of my invention used by LegalZoom. On top of that, I am honest with inventors with respect to what they can expect, and tell the truth that LegalZoom refuses to tell, which is that an attorney can always make the application better. You pretend that 1 to 1.5 pages of double spaced, nebulous output is the equivalent of a provisional patent application created by a patent attorney or patent agent. That is laughable, and you know it. So your claims of saving $XXX compared to hiring an attorney is ridiculous. Money is saved because the product is awful.

Just to be clear, the preferred way to use the Invent & Patent System, and the way I use it in practice, is to have people answer the questions before a patent search is performed. Unlike LegalZoom’s searches, which used to be done by those in India, we do searches here in the US and really investigate to find the best prior art. I then create a detailed patentability assessment that is 3 to 4 pages long, and if the inventor wants to move forward they once again answer the Invent + Patent questions, so we have a high quality, domestic US patent search, 3 to 4 pages of analysis and 6 pages single spaced provided by the inventor. And you have the audacity to act as if your 1 to 1.5 pages is comparable. Really, who are you trying to fool? Yourself?

The thing you never understood, and apparently still don’t, is that as a lawyer I have a license to practice law and LegalZoom does not. It is a simple concept really. It is confusing to me why you can’t understand that.

The truth is that you are the reason our relationship ended. We had reached a deal to offer a service within the rules of practice and you came in, undid the deal negotiated, refused to make simple changes required by law and wanted us to prepare and file provisional applications for $225. You were offered reasonable terms that would have kept LegalZoom from violating 37 CFR 11.5. You opted to go a different way and pursue a path I believe to be the unauthorized practice of law.

The LegalZoom CEO told me that you all discovered that while people say they want to do it themselves they really don’t. Thus it seems LegalZoom doing more and more was a knowing choice.

By the way, my billable rate is $350 per hour. My site is growing by leaps and bounds and I am doing well, very well really. I do appreciate your concern though.

Too bad you never listened to my advice. If you had you wouldn’t be facing a class action in Missouri, investigations in others states and LegalZoom wouldn’t have the UPL concerns. You also wouldn’t face the prospect of a patent infringement lawsuit once my patent issues on the patent system I created and LegalZoom uses. Funny how you never cared to lock up the IP assets you built your patent offerings on. Talk about reckless! And you think LegalZoom can help others when you can’t even help yourself.

Cheers!

-Gene
Brian Liu
April 20, 2010 07:47 pm
“The trouble with the model is, at least in my opinion, people say they want to do it themselves but really don’t, or can’t, not at least without making mistakes.”

Gene, it’s interesting you say that, since you offer your own competing do-it-yourself patent system. If that statement is true, then by your own logic, there must be a lot of attorneys who are fixing the problems caused by YOUR OWN Invent + Patent System. If you don’t acknowledge any problems caused by your own system, then your former statement about self-help models MUST be untrue. (Your statement panned of all self-help models, not just LegalZoom.)

Your Invent + Patent System is being sold by IPWatchdog Inc., a NY Corporation. It has to be self-help software. And you’re promoting it pretty heavily on your blog, since there’s an ad for it on the top of every page.

BTW, isn’t this supposed to be an IP blog? If so, why are you spending your valuable time ($250 per hour!) reporting on the economic incentives given to us by the State of Texas? I know you’ve got a very personal (and now hypocritical) animosity towards our company, stemming from the fact that our business relationship ended over a year and a half ago. This post, which has absolutely nothing to do with IP, says a lot about your very personal grudge.
James
February 26, 2010 08:18 pm
In my opinion, it would be better to lower business taxes across the board in order to attract businesses rather than take from existing businesses (and citizens) and give special benefits to a few. I’ll bet a lot of businesses won’t even try to get these TEF grants because they don’t want to deal with the government bureaucracy required to get approval.
pop
February 22, 2010 02:05 pm
-Gene

I don’t k now for sure that I would have ever used LegalZoom if I didn’t read your blog, but I’m sure I wont now, and especially after your last article about them. Every time I see the commercials on TV now, I find myself slightly disgusted that they advertise themselves as experts when they are offering what some would call untrustworthy services. At least with a program like TurboTax, they really do have experts who can help you, and they spell it out before you file that you must pay for the extra legal help from real lawyers. It seems to me that LegalZoom is selling expertise it does not posses and defrauding the public. How shameful.

And btw, I am working on a large comment about your latest Bilski post, but it isn’t’ ready yet. I don’t want you to think that I am ignoring it.

-pop
Gene Quinn
February 20, 2010 11:17 am
Tom-

I don’t begrudge Texas trying to bring in more jobs, that seems like a responsible thing to do. The trouble is that so many attorneys work to fix the problems caused by individuals relying on LegalZoom, which is unfortunate. The trouble with the model is, at least in my opinion, people say they want to do it themselves but really don’t, or can’t, not at least without making mistakes.

As far as investing in a bank near bankruptcy, that sounds so like government.

-Gene
Tom
February 20, 2010 07:48 am
The Texas Enterprise Fund does not always make good gambles. A few years ago, TEF granted a bank about $15 million to come to San Antonio. When the bank was near bankruptcy, its management sold off its assets, leaving the $15 million as stranded debt. Texas taxpayers were left holding the bag.