Ted Jordan and the software that learned to listen

A client could acquire several identities without ever leaving a Queenstown law office. One version lived in the trust-accounting program. Another appeared in the business accounts. Outlook and document software had their own opinions. Lawyer Michael Holloway had audited his firm’s information and discovered a small administrative comedy: the computers could all be working, while disagreeing about the person they were working for.

Ted Jordan was the software developer helping him untangle it. Their work brought Actionstep into a law-office setting and earned the implementation a place among the 2007 Computerworld Excellence Awards finalists. The attraction was easy to explain. Enter information once. Keep the work connected. Let the next person see what had happened in the file.

Holloway even invoked the golf course when explaining why lawyers might prefer less time reconciling software. Jordan’s pitch was equally concrete: a browser and an internet connection could give people access to their business. The expensive machine under the desk would no longer have quite so much authority over the working day.

The client record with several versions

Jordan had arrived at this problem by a fairly long route. Born in South Africa, he spent 15 years in the American software industry before moving to New Zealand. He wrote the software that became Actionstep and founded the company in 2004. His intended audience was broader than the legal profession: smaller businesses that needed the machinery of a business without having to commission it all afresh.

His design allowed individual businesses to tailor the platform. Lawyers proved particularly interested, and the company kept adapting to them. Its first New Zealand law-firm customer arrived in 2005. By 2014, Jordan could describe a business whose users had helped choose its direction. The lawyers had kept coming back.

“We do everything by what clients want.”

Ted Jordan · 2014

There is an appealing lack of ceremony about that explanation. Customers wanted things done. The software had to accommodate them. A founder’s original market description could be amended.

A business that could change its mind

The irritation behind Actionstep concerned what happens when the work changes but the software stays stubbornly loyal to its original instructions. A process has been built into an application. The people using it discover a better sequence, or their business takes a different shape. The application continues issuing orders as though nothing has happened.

Jordan’s response was to make the workflow adaptable. Users could shape the system around the process they needed. That decision remains central to Actionstep’s account of its beginnings. It is a deceptively practical ambition. Organizations routinely change their minds; their tools need some capacity to follow along.

The company’s earlier product history preserves evidence of that wider business audience. In October 2009, Jordan was introducing CRM+, a sales and marketing product aimed at smaller companies looking for new business in a difficult economy. It could collect responses from website forms and connect with other small-business accounting systems.

The reason for building it was customer demand. Jordan explained that clients had identified finding business as their immediate need. That detail makes the later legal specialization easier to understand: the company was already responding to the problems customers brought to it, even when those problems were outside the law office.

Listening sometimes meant watching. During work on Actionstep 14, clients were filmed using the software so the team could notice their reactions to its usability. The resulting changes included an electronic scratch pad for passing observations and a shared activity timeline. Even a fleeting expression could be useful product feedback.

The unglamorous work of making things easier

A flexible workflow still needs useful things to happen inside it. Document creation was one such opportunity. Actionstep’s integration with HotDocs Cloud Services joined its practice-management system to automated document generation. Jordan described the aim as simplifying practice management through a flexible, comprehensive solution. The integration announcement put that ambition into an everyday task: preparing documents from information already being managed.

Consider the modest dignity of avoiding another round of typing. The benefit does not require a dramatic presentation. A detail that is already known can travel to the place where it is needed. For a software builder, that is a satisfying kind of progress: fewer opportunities for someone to introduce a fresh discrepancy.

Payments followed the same practical logic. In September 2015, Actionstep announced an integration with ProPay, enabling clients to settle legal invoices by card or bank account. The available routes included the web, email and text message. The announcement emphasized access without a separate payment portal or mobile app.

Jordan’s explanation focused on making the business of running a law firm less burdensome. It is easy for a software company’s identity to disappear into its list of features. Read together, these choices suggest a consistent product concern: reduce the little administrative journeys that stand between doing the work and completing the business around it.

These are the details that give a software career its texture. A document reaches the right place. A payment has a shorter route home. There is little glamour in either transaction, which may explain why they are so easy to overlook. Yet the accumulated inconvenience of ordinary tasks is precisely what gives a business tool its purpose. Jordan kept working in that territory.

The founder also took a public role in explaining the details. In an Actionstep video, Jordan introduced Enhanced Billing Mode. The billing demonstration is still available to watch. It is an appropriately workmanlike appearance in this particular career: a founder talking through the part of professional life that begins after the interesting work is done.

An office across the ocean

As Actionstep reached beyond New Zealand, access to software was only part of the problem. Customers also needed access to people. In November 2017, the company announced its first UK office, in Aldgate, London. Jordan linked the decision to an increase in British customers and inquiries that year.

The London office was intended to improve support and handle demand. The company already had offices in New Zealand, Canada and the United States, with representatives in Australia. That is a useful distinction in a story about cloud software. A product can cross a border more easily than a support organization can establish itself on the other side.

There were people around Jordan helping make that transition. Triona Saunders later recalled meeting him after moving to New Zealand and immediately seeing potential in Actionstep. Her background included work inside law firms, where she had wanted tools of the sort the company was building.

Her recollection places the growing team alongside the founder. A product becomes more intelligible when people who understand its customers help explain it. Jordan’s initial observation had to become something colleagues could develop, demonstrate, sell and support across different markets. The expanding company required more kinds of knowledge than the original code could contain.

Making room at the top

In September 2020, Actionstep announced an investment from Serent Capital. It was the company’s first institutional investment partnership. Jordan wanted its resources and growth team to help extend Actionstep’s reach in New Zealand, Australia, Britain and the United States. The partnership was aimed at product, sales and organizational investment, giving the international business more capacity to grow.

The timing offers another perspective on the length of the undertaking. Sixteen years separated the founding from that announcement. Software careers are often compressed into a launch and a funding event. Jordan’s included the less convenient middle: customers, revisions, integrations, local offices and the work of making a company function in several places.

By July of that year, his appearance on Capstone Business Talks was addressing those operating questions. The conversation was presented around capital raising, building a team, international expansion and managing close to 100 people. The 33-minute episode captures Actionstep as a substantial management undertaking, with the founder responsible for more than a product idea.

Two years later, the operating role changed hands. Actionstep announced Early Stephens as global CEO in 2022, with Jordan retiring from that position and remaining chairman. Stephens brought experience leading software businesses; the company emphasized further expansion, particularly in the United States.

Jordan publicly backed the handover. The same announcement said Actionstep had nearly doubled its headcount since the Serent investment and that 40 percent of its global subscribers were in the US. A business designed to accommodate changing work had reached a point where its own leadership arrangements changed, too.

The lawyers and the shorter agreement

In March 2026, Jordan returned to the mechanics of doing business in a personal essay. He recalled trying to formalize arrangements with lawyers while building Actionstep: trials, partnerships and other engagements. Lengthy contracts could generate revisions and delays. He described using short, plain-language memoranda to record what both parties had discussed.

The account is his recollection of finding a workable administrative shortcut, with the option of a more formal agreement later. He also wrote that the experience had planted the seed of a new product. The old concern was still recognizable: people had agreed to do something, and the process of getting started was making it difficult.

That is a fitting place to leave Jordan’s story. The work keeps bringing him back to the space between an intention and its execution. A client record, a document, an invoice, an agreement. Ordinary things, each capable of consuming a quite extraordinary portion of the afternoon.