React Staff Augmentation for a Legal Services Company (NASDAQ) to Meet State Requirements (2026)

The client is an American publicly traded company, listed on NASDAQ, with $700M+ in annual revenue and 1,000+ employees. It provides legal services online and acts as the go-between for business owners and state government agencies throughout the life of a company, from forming it to closing it.

Entrepreneurs come to its website to form an LLC or a corporation in the US, file an annual report, make changes to their company or dissolve it.

Business owners answer questions in an online questionnaire, which is a React web interface, and it is built to be simple because most business owners have no legal background.

Our client's platform uses these answers to prepare the legal documents that the state requires, files them with the state on behalf of the business owner, and then sends the documents approved by the state back to the business owner. Our client's staff oversee this process and step in when it is needed.

Our client works with a company during its whole life, so its services include business formation (LLCs, corporations, nonprofit corporations), federal tax ID (EIN) and DBA (trade name) registration, annual reports, amendments, registering to do business in another state (foreign qualification), conversion to another entity type, dissolution, certificates of good standing and registered agent service.

Our Client's Front End Is Critical for Its Business. Any Problem with Fields Keeps It from Functioning Properly

Our client is an online legal services company, so its business depends on a functional questionnaire, which is the primary touch point between our client and its customers (business owners) and a key part of its services. Our client's business relies on its web form platform functioning properly, because it is the product business owners actually pay for.

The core value proposition of our client is a user-friendly UX for business owners with no legal background. They can easily fill out a simple digital form that looks different depending on the state and the type of company, does the checks automatically and provides instructive error messages to catch right away any mistake that would get the filing rejected by the state authorities. This is a level of UX that the official state form does not provide. Business owners also value that they can receive all the documents they need from one intermediary, a one-stop shop, via one form. Even though the form has many steps, it is still better than dealing with the websites of different government agencies.

Business owners are nervous about making a mistake in the legal documents the state requires for their business, and they are ready to pay our client to have it done right the first time. This is why our client's customer-facing front end had to work flawlessly and gather complete and accurate information the state requires in a professional-looking form.

Why Our Client Needed Help: Too Much Manual Work for Its Staff and a Big Backlog of Automation Tasks

Our client operates in all 50 states. Most states ask a business owner for the same basic information, and our client automated the process of gathering it.

However, many requirements vary by state: some apply to every company in that state, but others depend on the type of business.

For example, in Indiana, since January 1, 2026, certain health care providers have to disclose their ownership in the business entity report. In Kentucky, under a law amended in March 2025, retailers have to say whether they sell nicotine vapor products.

When a form didn't ask for something the state needed, the client's staff had to stop the order, get the missing details from the customer and fix the order by hand.

The client gets thousands of orders, so these manual fixes took up a lot of staff time.

To prevent manual corrections, the forms had to be changed: get the fields and questions each state needs, get validation for the answers, and stop showing the questions that a particular state doesn't need for a particular type of business.

There was a large backlog of such changes to be implemented through automation, and the client's React team urgently needed affordable, cost-effective, professional React engineers to work through it.

In 2025, the client's Vice President, Enterprise Segment, was looking to augment their React team with engineers for six months to a year to work on the customer-facing forms and questionnaires.

They found us through our website belitsoft.com. We had a meeting and got started.

React Engineers Who Work Through the Backlog as Part of the Client's Team

We started in June 2025 with two React engineers. They got access to the client's VPN, GitHub and Jira, ran the project locally, and took their first tickets a week after the kick-off.

The client owned the backlog and assigned the tasks, and our engineers worked as part of its in-house team. They sent their changes to the client's code review, checked them on test orders and handed them to the client for acceptance before release. From the first month they also reviewed other developers' pull requests. Each engineer reported every day, ticket by ticket, so the client knew what every paid hour was spent on.

About two thirds of the tickets in the backlog were small changes for one state: add a field, add a check for an answer, stop showing a question. Each of them took a day or less. But a new field has to go through the questionnaire, the validation rules, the order API and the client's internal tools, otherwise the staff don't see it in the order and it doesn't get into the document, so one engineer took such a change through all of these systems, covered it with tests and released new pages and questions behind a feature flag.

About a third of the time went into 27 large tasks that took more than a week each. These were rules that had to work across all states or all products at once, new multi-page questionnaires for one state, and new flows. For example, the rule that a company cannot be its own member or officer is one check, but it had to work in the annual reports of every state and every type of company.

The engineers were hired as extra hands for the backlog, but they were also able to handle these complex tasks. They worked on a new way of building questionnaires, built the pages of a new questionnaire for converting a company to another entity type, and moved a shared page out of one questionnaire so that all formation questionnaires could use it. The largest state tasks were the address rules for all products in California, the dissolution questionnaire with tax document upload in Pennsylvania, the annual report and amendment changes in Texas, the compliance questionnaires in Arizona, the industry code (NAICS) for six products in West Virginia, the management pages for LLCs in Massachusetts, and the address and contact fields in the District of Columbia. In several of these tasks the requirements changed while the work was in progress. They also investigated production issues and support tickets.

Our Engineers Were Responsible for the Quality of Their Own Changes and Tested Them Before the Client's Acceptance

Our client's front end had to work flawlessly, because any mistake in a field would get the filing rejected by the state authorities or make the client's staff fix the order by hand, so our engineers were responsible for the quality of their own changes and thoroughly tested their code.

When our engineers added a new field or a new page, they had to write unit tests for it (for example, for the address checks in California and for the new dissolution pages in Pennsylvania) and update the client's automated tests.

They tested their changes in the client's QA environment before they were released to production. They created test orders to cover the edge cases, and for rules that apply to many states they verified the change for all of these states. Sometimes they found problems that were not in the ticket (for example, inconsistencies in the validation rules), and fixed them as well.

To prepare a change for the client's acceptance (UAT), our engineers had to test and check it, write clear instructions and attach screenshots, so the client's team knew what to check before release.

13 Months of Work, About 430 Tickets, 46 States and the District of Columbia

The client was looking for React engineers for six months to a year, and worked with us for 13 months. During this time the team grew from two engineers to six and went down to two again, depending on how much of the backlog the client wanted to work through.

Our engineers worked through about 430 tickets from the client's backlog. The changes cover 46 states and the District of Columbia and all seven types of filings, mostly annual reports, registering to do business in another state and dissolution.

Most of the tickets added a field or a question a state needs, added a check for an answer, or removed a question a state doesn't need. This is what the client wanted in order to prevent manual corrections by its staff.

The client accepted the changes and released them to production.

New engineers got up to speed in two to five days, and each of them worked across the questionnaire, the validation rules and the order API.

In the autumn the team grew from two engineers to six within a month, and the new engineers got up to speed in two to five days. By February 2026 there were two engineers on the team again.

In June 2026 the engineers handed the work over to the client's team.

Used technologies: TypeScript, React, GraphQL, Playwright, unit testing, Vite, Astro, feature flags, GitHub Checks, and Jira. Claude-assisted development under senior enginner supervision.