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Intrinsic Value is all-important and is the only logical way to evaluate the relative attractiveness of investments and businesses.
Intrinsic Value is all-important and is the only logical way to evaluate the relative attractiveness of investments and businesses.
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Chantel, and I'll be your conference operator. Today, we will be hosting a conference call to discuss the fourth quarter and full year 2021 financial results for VIQ Solutions, Inc. [Operator Instructions] Your host for today is Ms. Laura Kiernan, Head of Investor Relations for VIQ. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Chantel, and good morning, everyone, and welcome to VIQ Solutions 2021 Fourth Quarter and Full Year Results Conference Call. Before we begin, I would like to point out that certain statements made on today's call contain forward-looking information. subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors. For a complete discussion of the risks and uncertainties facing VIQ, we refer you to the company's MD&A and other continuous disclosure filings, which are available on SEDAR at sedar.com and sec.gov. As a reminder, all dollar amounts are in U.S. dollars unless otherwise stated.
And with us today, we have Sebastien Pare, CEO; Alexie Edwards, our CFO; and Susan Sumner, our President and COO of VIQ, all of whom will be available for questions following the prepared remarks.
I will now turn the call over to Sebastien Pare to begin.
Thank you, Laura. Welcome, everyone, to our full year 2021 earnings call.
The first order of business today is to congratulate and welcome Susan Sumner and Shing Pan to the Board of Directors. Our Chairman, Larry Taylor, stated that he was excited to announce the appointment of these 2 highly accomplished executives to our Board and that Shing's technology experience and leadership in strategic growth will contribute substantially to advancing our goals and Susan's extensive operational and management experience in the global transcription industry, including VIQ for the last 4 years, adds meaningful perspective to our Board. These appointments further our ability to scale globally and achieve our strategic growth plan. Each of these seasoned professionals has an established record of accomplishment for executing strategies to build successful companies. They are the next step in our plan to expand the Board experience and operational acumen matching the needs of our growing global enterprise.
Now into our results. The past 12 months have been a remarkable journey for our company, our clients, our society and for many of us personally. I am pleased to report that VIQ has not only persevered during one of the most challenging business environments on record, but was able to finish 2021 strong by completing many of our commitments in the areas of cloud infrastructures, cyber security, products, capital and regulatory markets as well as acquisitions that will allow us to scale and our financials to lift significantly throughout 2022.
While 2021 was a challenging year, given the fluctuations of COVID recovery in our operating geographies, we have advanced our growth strategy and make extensive strides in overall operational performance. We're now ready to scale profitably to the next level. We have enhanced our capture to documentation offerings and expanded our client relationship by acquiring 2 key assets, including Auscript in Australia, and The Transcription Agency, otherwise known as TTA in the U.K. The strategic acquisitions are a foundation for future global growth in those regions.
The pro forma annual recurring revenue for last year increased by 63% to USD 48.6 million from $29.7 million for the comparative period in 2020. This is a new baseline revenue that we're working with, with 2022 and beyond. Please note the ARR of $29.7 million is slightly below our total reported revenue of $31.75 million last year because some of the revenue was not recurring.
A key intellectual property patent was obtained for our artificial intelligent innovations that covers 10 unique aspects of our patent aiAssist, automated workflow and analysis platform. The technology productivity impact in insurance and law enforcement was demonstrated last year. In 2022, we expect to achieve productivity improvements in our Court vertical, which will further increase the sustainability of our gross margin expansion.
Also during late 2021, we capitalized on our global labor capacity to lessen the impact of COVID and labor shortages in our operating regions. We did this by rethinking structurally how we utilize this asset while still providing our secure end-to-end solutions without compromising speed and accuracy of the content. With our 2 most recent acquisitions, our Court segment is forecasted to represent 65% of our 2022 revenue globally, which is an increase from 34% in 2021. We expect most of our existing courts and media clients as well as the ones gains from these 2 most recent acquisitions, will migrate into NetScribe platform, which is powered by aiAssist over the course of 2022. The shift towards Legal Courts is expected to enable higher productivity and further gross margin expansion. Susan will get into a lot of those topics when she speaks.
We also expect a shift in revenue towards Australia following the completion of the Auscript acquisition, with approximately 50% of our 2022 revenue derived from Australia versus 31% last year.
Now I will hand it over to Alexie who will provide a high-level overview of our financial results and goals for 2022. When he's finished, Susan will provide additional insight into our operating results. Then we'll open up the lines for answering questions, and I'll come back to you for closing remarks.
Alexie?
Thank you, Sebastien, and good morning, good afternoon, and good evening to everyone. [indiscernible] content published in our press release, I would like to make remarks on a few key highlights from our results last year and reaffirm our goals for 2022.
We reported total revenue of $31 million in 2021, which decreased 2% versus the prior year. However, when compared to 2019 or the last year before the pandemic, we saw meaningful trends in revenue. For example, our U.S. revenue was only $14.5 million in 2019, but increased to $22.2 million in 2020 and declined to $19 million in 2021. The U.S. decline in 2021 versus 2020 was driven by several factors, including some difficult comparisons. Our U.S. Media revenue was significantly lower due to skewed year-over-year comparisons. During 2020, the company completed a large onetime archive project that was not repeated in 2021. 2020 also included additional volumes relating to the election cycle that weren't repeated in 2021. Combined with the COVID-19 impact on the traditional conference and business throughout the year, Media, Corporate and Government was negatively impacted in what has otherwise been a growth vertical through the addition of 2 major new broadcast clients in Q4 and a significant Q1 '22 ramp up by our largest Media client in financial earnings work.
Lower U.S. insurance claims in 2021 attributed to slower U.S. recovery in car accident claims due to reduced movement of people and traffic from the lockdowns and decreased local policing activities from government mandated lockdowns in various states and local communities. These resulted in lower volumes of insurance recorded statements, police interviews and transcription revenue in Insurance and Law Enforcement segments.
In Australia, our revenue went from about $9 million in 2019 to $8.5 million in 2020 and was about $9.5 million in 2021. In Australia, our growth was hampered and revenues were deferred as a result of having 163 billing days that were negatively impacted by COVID-19 lockdowns during 2021. And these factors are partially offset by: one, acquisition-related revenue in U.K. and Australia, which contributed about $900,000 for the year and adoption of FirstDraft technology. Please note, the late December close of Auscript was tied to the delayed clearance by the Australian Competitive Bureau. And subsequently had an estimated $2 million impact on planned revenues versus reported results. We expect that our U.S., Australia and U.K. revenues to normalize in '22, including the acquisitions.
Now on to our gross margin. Our gross profit of $14.9 million was 48% of revenue versus 61% for the same period in 2020. The decrease in gross profit was primarily due to the reduction of COVID-19 wage subsidies and delayed revenue resulting from the pandemic. Excluding the COVID-19 wage subsidies impact, gross margin for the full year would be 46% compared to 42% for the full year 2020, represented an increase of approximately 395 basis points. Please note that we have referenced the gross margins excluding subsidies on the presentation.
Driving the increase of about 4 percentage points in gross margin excluding the impact of COVID-19 wage subsidies this past year were the following factors: one, the migration of technology services, particularly in the Insurance and Law Enforcement verticals; two, proven labor force efficiency gains from the implementation of NetScribe and aiAssist technologies enabled a reduction in rates paid per unit of production for certain segments; three, the migration to a global labor force to better utilize access to labor across VIQ entities; fourthly, the stabilization of the labor force in the U.S. post COVID-19 reducing requirements for bonus payments to incentivize the contract labor; fifthly, we believe the shift towards Legal or Courts will be a driver of improvements planned for next year; and finally, the company expects to continue to trend further towards predictable, recurring higher-margin revenue as FirstDraft is adopted and more clients leverage higher-margin machine drafts. We have reaffirmed our goals for 2022. Our financial expectations include generating at least $50 million in revenue, while gross margin expected to be between 47% to 55%.
As Sebastien mentioned, our pro forma annual recurring revenue rate at end of last year was about $49 million. When you include a full year of 2021 base recurring revenue and TTA and Auscript acquired annualized revenue of approximately $14 million, and a major court contract of approximately $6 million, which effectively began in December 2021 upon the close of the Auscript acquisition. This really means that we at least $50 million in revenue for this year is achievable, almost with no additional organic growth. We do expect to pursue additional organic growth, especially in light of the recovery following the reopening of the economy as COVID-19 restrictions subside.
We're allocating capital towards the highest and best use included acquisitions, organic growth drivers such as investment in technology, sales and marketing and infrastructure development. The company's capital allocation is centered on generating organic growth, investment in technologies, mergers and acquisition and balance sheet deleveraging. Our goal with capital allocation is to increase the earning power of the company and reinvest the free cash flow of the business to generate more cash. We plan to demonstrate to our shareholders that flight wheel post pandemic started in Q2 throughout '22 with a key priority being using cash to pay down debt.
In the last slide annual reports, we have demonstrated incremental increases in gross margin and revenue. While results may appear lumpy in the last 2 years due to the societal disruptions from the pandemic, that incremental progression over time is moving in a very solid direction.
Now I'd like to turn it over to Susan.
Thank you, Alexie. I'm honored to have been appointed to the Board of Directors along with Shing, and I'd like to thank the Board. The Board, like VIQ is committed to diversity in both the actual representation of the directors and the leadership team, but also diversity in skills, approach and thinking to support the challenge -- to challenge our strategies in technology, segmentation and global expansion. I know I speak to the Board, Sebastien and Alexie in saying that we are committed to continuing this journey of diversity and inclusion across all of VIQ.
Since Alexie has covered much of the high level financial trends, I would like to get a little more granular on our operational improvements, M&A migrations and newly introduced KPI.
Let me pivot to the operational achievements of 2021 as there certainly were many.
We committed to expanding our sales and distribution organizations and we have. In 2021, we added incremental sales and distribution resources in North America and the U.K. and announced expanded partnerships around the world. We have established those key partnerships awards and awards in 2021 that will help us to drive organic growth in 2022, and here are a few highlights. We were awarded the integrated digital court reporting systems for the Supreme Court of Florida, which gives VIQ the ability to market and sell CapturePro suite of solutions to the Florida court without individual RFP. This award validates the value of our innovative technologies, our global expertise to provide accurate and secure digital recording solutions that meet and exceed the needs of that client base. Dagostino Electronic systems is a U.S.-based full-service technology integrator and became a VIQ partner in 2021. VIQ will see immense value in this new partnership in 2 key areas: we are now able to put the VIQ suite of solutions on the COSTARS contract for the state of Pennsylvania as well as utilize their expertise in audio and video to help us consult, design and implement courtrooms of the future around the world.
As technology plays an increasing role in the transformation of court workflow, court personnel recognize the need for innovation solutions to keep pace with the vast amount of courtroom evidence that is being produced and shared. The law and order, VIQ Solutions partnership brings together significant industry knowledge, technological solutions and professional client services organization to support successful planning transformations in the courtroom.
And finally, we signed a strategic partnership agreement with LegalCraft to create an integrated solution using the Lexel platform, which optimizes legal case analysis, trial preparations and real-time transcription to assist legal professionals globally.
Given our history with the district attorney and public defenders, law firms are a natural extension of our Court focus and our current client base. VIQ was the first LegalCraft's strategic partnership to offer Lexel's robust collaborative case management platform in the United States.
All of these partnerships and frameworks bolster our ability to expand our reach in selling our end-to-end solution to the legal and media verticals. This pivot to court is driven by successful acquisitions of Auscript and TTA, where 65% of our revenue is now tied to court services, positioning us to lead in this sector.
We committed to consistently improving gross margins in 2021. And as presented by Alexie earlier, we delivered on those improvements, net of subsidies resulting in a 395 basis point improvement. Much of this gain is a result of the maturity of our technology and the scale we have gained from the deployment of that technology.
During 2020 and 2021, there was a focus given to migration of the Insurance and Law Enforcement segments in the U.S. But the biggest impact on gross margin will be in 2022 when the technology is now ready to take on Media and Courts, which is expected to represent nearly 2/3 of our overall revenue.
While incremental R&D was required in 2021 due to the level of complexity to manage our court documents, the productivity gains in that space will be significant. Also contributing to the gain was a shift to utilize our global workforce to address the challenges associated with the availability of our U.S. labor force and the management of the velocity required to maintain and grow our business.
We took advantage of the available labor from closures in Australia and to cross-train the organizations to share work while still maintaining the security requirements of our clients. This is where we really see the advantage of the combination of our workflow technology platform layered with the flexibility of our language models and our AI. Regardless of where the work is done on our platform, the work is secure, and the platform can adapt to the language nuances and customization requirements of the clients.
Over 2022, we will continue to expand our global access to labor by expanding our footprint into new geographies that will provide opportunities for both transcription and administrative labor. We call this [ Project Titan ], and we expect to see the full benefit of this effort in 2023.
We also committed to continuing with aggressive M&A pursuits in 2021 to build scale around our deployed infrastructure. In October, we completed the purchase of TTA in the U.K. And this is strategic because it provided VIQ a services footprint in geographies where we share our largest capture client. This coincided with the launch of our NetScribe technology. putting secure infrastructure within the borders of the U.K. to allow us to rapidly grow. Shortly after the acquisition, we began to deploy the award for the houses of parliament. We are also undertaking a major trial with a key judicial customer and our local partners to innovate the way content is summarized and made available to users.
In October, we also announced the acquisition of Auscript in Australia. I cannot overstate the importance of this addition to the VIQ enterprise. Important not only in size but also in scale, it brings to the vertical to the Court vertical, which has now become so critical to VIQ. The marriage of the complex requirements of court documentation workflow and content with efficiency gains from our technology. This is very exciting. The result of our aiAssist trial and migration, which was only touched on in 2021 in the Legal and Courts vertical, was better than expected and significantly better than we have seen in other segments. It is that success that gave us the push to complete the acquisition as neither TTA or Auscript have deployed aiAssist-like solution.
The timing of the Auscript acquisition was certainly not optimal as the time required for regulatory approval was unexpected. The commencement of the contract occurred right at the beginning of the holiday shutdown, so our first month post acquisition drove the highest cost and the lowest revenue. Now with the holidays and COVID firmly behind us, the organization is back to pre-COVID levels, and we'll now focus on the migration and our technologies over later this year.
Our pivot to the Court segment will not only accelerate our gross margin goals in 2022, but it will also allow us to take advantage of our key investments in technology around the world. As we look at our technology gains in 2021, the commercial launch of both NetScribe and FirstDraft, particularly with the Court enabled customization accelerates our competitive advantage in delivering our end-to-end solutions that enable our clients to gain the most value from capture, workflow and speech recognition technologies.
We also plan to expand our hybrid technology services portfolio to include NetScribe live. This will take on traditional capture and transcript creation and turn it to a new level, enabling real-time capture and editing in both courts and media. This access to fast edit will change the overall concept of turnaround time and delivery, creating a new competitive advantage for VIQ.
Some of our competitors focus on speech from their capture technologies, while others focus on editing and speech-to-text alone. We believe that the core value of our strategy sits in the integration of both. Whether a court or a media outlet chooses to capture or edit via their own infrastructure or partition any element of that workflow, we meet them there, with the enhancements that allow them to use VIQ for some or all of their requirements.
And while the labor shortage is impacting court resourcing, particularly in the U.S., we believe that our NetScribe to NetScribe live will allow governmental agencies to improve their throughput with existing resources while reducing costs, but also improving the security and the usability of the content they create.
In 2021, we also invested in security and IT infrastructure to ensure that we comply with governmental requirements that vary across the globe and to prepare for running an integrated cloud architecture. We have preserved our ISO 27001 standard within our media and U.K. operations and expect to be globally certified later in 2022.
In 2021, we also committed to establishing the baseline for tracking KPIs to provide a consistent methodology to provide measurable tracking of our operating performance. We have outlined in -- we will outline in detail along with definitions of those metrics in our MD&A. So I will not specifically list them today. We will, however, provide the first comparable of Q1 2021 to Q1 2022 in our Q1 earnings release in the next few months. I will highlight a few of those metrics and why they are important in evaluating the health and the progress of the company.
First, the annual recurring revenue, ARR, this is a critical metric in evaluating the ongoing stability of the client base and the impact of our organic growth and churn. While we certainly will evolve our ability to distinguish between organic growth versus churn in our reporting. The run rate will provide a baseline year trend of recurring revenue to track the required progress of organic growth through the year. As previously discussed, our 2021 year in pro forma run rate was approximately $49 million.
Another important metric is our average cost to produce a minute of transcription. This provides visibility into the cost efficiencies gained from the improvement in our technology and the related cost reductions tied to variable labor. This is an important metric to be used in conjunction with gross margin as it is not influenced by pricing, but much more aligned with the scale and the performance and the efficiency gains of the platform. While no one could have anticipated the impacts associated with the extended COVID and regulatory delays that impacted our results in 2021, there were significant measurable achievements that allowed us to prepare for our future. We look forward to 2022. We are excited about the ongoing execution of our strategy and continuing to deliver the innovation to the industries that we serve.
Now I would like to hand it over to the operator for the Q&A session.
[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Brian Kinstlinger with Alliance Global Partners.
I wanted to start with business development. You said this, too, from new disclosure, you've got $48.6 million in annual recurring revenue on hand. So even you said it's not going to take a lot of growth to get you to $50 million. Can you talk about your pipeline in terms of how it compares to a year ago, also pre-COVID maybe in total contract value or a number of procurements, in which verticals you're seeing the most near-term opportunity of course, excluding the Queensland contract, which we know is already in the numbers?
So maybe I'll just -- I'll start. That's a good question on our side. So overall, we want to come out of the 2 years of COVID conservatively. And I think it was important for people to appreciate what that new run rate is about. So what we've done now is the pipeline. There was a lot of delays. We talked about the backlog last year. All of this now is being activated, and we're actually going to be doing quite well on that side of it. But we wanted to be conservative in our forward-looking guidance for this year. And purposely, we are focusing now on the run rate. And then quarter-over-quarter, we will provide you with a little bit more visibility towards our progression, towards the organic growth in terms of that. Susan?
Yes. Thanks, Brian. The pipeline is building in a way that's kind of hard to comprehend just because -- what I would say, the sleeping giants globally around the court space are now firmly awake and active in both RFPs as well as changing the way they do business for a couple of reasons. One, they have a significant backlog from their closures and they have to be innovative in the way they look at courtroom efficiency and also that they had extensions and renewals that didn't allow them to actually execute on new evaluation during the shutdown phase. And they're also adjusting by the way, I mentioned it in my statements to labor shortages, which are impacting their own in-house transcription resources.
So we are growing the pipeline all over the globe, but particular growth, which is really interesting to us in the U.S. market, where there is much more demand for that end-to-end solution that I talked about in my comments. So the pipeline is very robust. It's certainly higher than it was in 2020 or 2021, and we're seeing accelerated growth from there.
I think I answered all of your questions, Brian. Maybe there was something...
You did a great job. And then you mentioned a trial with a key judicial customer kind of said that quickly, but I figure you wouldn't say that if it wasn't meaningful. So are you able at all to give to size the opportunity and how you expect the trial to last?
And then my next question, and I'll get back in the queue, is as you look at your portfolio of contracts, are any of them experiencing lower volumes or COVID restrictions? Or is there any headwinds to your business still in the first half of the year? I guess I'm just trying to understand if we're at the steady state of run rate? Or is there still is more headwinds to the business right now?
Sebastien, should I take that?
Yes, go ahead.
So the first question -- I'll kind of answer them in reverse. Are there incremental headwinds? And are we feeling that we're kind of past the COVID? I'm going to talk to each of the segments, but I will start with courts, which is courts are interesting. They have accelerated in the spring because they are fully out of the what I would call the COVID fog operationally. The challenge that you have with courts, and we talked about this earlier, is that it's hard for them to make up lost volume because they have a fixed number of courtrooms. So we're working collaboratively with them to help them bring capture and technology in new ways. That also speaks to what we're doing in the U.K., Brian. I can't effectively size this because we are in the early stages of this trial. But if the trial is successful, it will be material not only in the offering with this particular client but also to all of our judicial customers around the world.
In terms of the insurance space, the insurance space has been interesting. You may have seen there were a couple of challenges. One of our largest insurance clients is climbing back and they're climbing back quickly. The GEICO contract was heavily impacted in 2020 and 2021, and we're seeing good steady recovery on that account.
When we look at the rest of the insurance space, just the nature of the business is that the recorded statements that we do relate to work that was done either 6 to 9 months prior to the accident. So if you're in a car accident, you're going to have conflict with your insurance company. It's probably going to take 6 to 9 months to get to the point where they're actually determining if they're going to litigate. So we are in that recovery stage, but we're still seeing some lumpiness in the insurance space. But in the way that we're looking at the business in terms of the steady climb of the average revenue per day, which is one of the metrics you're going to see us talk more about, we're seeing absolute improvements month-over-month.
So I think that with Insurance and Law Enforcement, we're adapting to some of the legacy stuff from 2021. I wouldn't call it a headwind, I would say we're seeing a very healthy and steady improvement in the average daily volume that will get us back to the steady state this year. Probably closer to midyear than -- and it's growing aggressively.
Your next question comes from Scott Buck with H.C. Wainwright.
First, I was hoping you could help reconcile 4Q revenue of $7.5 million with the $11 million or so of that was embedded in the full year guidance. I know the Auscript closing being pushed was about $2 million of that, but it's still $1.5 million to $2 million that's kind of unaccounted for. Could you kind of give us some color around that?
Yes. So there's really 2 components to the bridge, Scott. One is obviously the delay in that closing. I mean we ended up closing 2 months almost behind schedule because of the reasons we discussed. So that's a $2 million impact. So that will have taken us to that $33 million and also that there was about 163 billing days last year that were negatively impacted with COVID and thing so when that -- and that was worth about $1.2 million based on all the audited work that we've done. So that's the bridge to the $34 million. So if those 2 things will have unfolded as planned, basically, we will have basically met our target of last year.
All right. That's helpful, Sebastien. And then, can we talk a little bit about longer-term gross margin expectations or targets? It looks like at the midpoint, there's a nice sequential move up in the guide for 2022. But where could we be 3 or 4 years from now? Could we push 60%?
Yes. So I think that's the direction definitely we're taking. And if you look back at what we've shown, I mean, really, we took the technology commercially really early 2019, and then we've acknowledged early on that the bulk of that year, there were some, obviously, some early hiccups related to the deployment and all of that. But really, the migration got accelerated in '20, and then '21, we really, really went to town of migrating all our Insurance and Law Enforcement. And you could look at it in terms of the gross margin implications. We've been able to lift that. What we're seeing now is none of our Courts revenue has been fully migrated yet. And now this represents 65% of our global revenue moving forward, based on the early trials that we've been working on with our Courts customers, the productivity gains that Susan was alluding to, is actually very significant. It's above expectations.
So what we want to do now is with that confidence and saying, listen, we will have met last year's revenue subject to the bridge that we talk about. And just remember that none of the Courts' productivity gains, i.e., gross margins in the Courts have started to flow to our P&L, never mind lifting the financials. So it's really on the back of that, and that's why we were more than ever determined last year to close on the TTA and the Auscript because of now we saw the implication of the AI within that court revenue. So it's a very significant piece of what it means for 2022 onwards.
As far as what we want to be is corporately across all verticals that basically we're aiming towards 47% to 55% last year, and that will be significant. What we want to do now is, obviously, we're getting closer to 60%. And I think that's really where we're going for 2023 because remember, behind the scene, and Susan may comment about it, the technology is gaining maturity, the language models and all the different things that we do with aiAssist is now being able to process. You saw that in the press release.
Our AI revenue process, our AI is now up by almost 24.5%. So the volume is really starting to go true. We're going to get the bulk of the Media and the revenue volume to the AI this year. So it's on the back of that, that I feel really comfortable that in 2023 onwards, then we're going to be talking about the 60%, 62%, 63%. And it will be an incremental growth, but that will be really significant. And if you actually start modeling that against the financials on that side of it.
That's really great color, Sebastien. And then last one for me. You called out organic growth opportunities in 2022 as part of the goals, but there's nothing in there about inorganic growth. Are we taking a pause from M&A at the moment?
Yes. So what we've said is really, look, we -- obviously, if we do the math, it will be a significant growth year this year regardless. What we're saying is we're approaching organically conservatively, and we want to basically be able to prove to everybody that organic growth, and we will adjust as we're moving forward.
But overall, the answer is our pipeline is still very active. But the direction that we're taking right now is because of the impact of the Court revenue on the gross margin, everybody's all hands on deck right now to accelerate the migration of the TTA Court revenue into NetScribe, aiAssist, that was during the heavy lifting in Q1. This should be up and running next week. That's a big nut.
If you remember, historically, Scott, it took us anywhere between 9 and 10 months historically to migrate an asset. In the case of TTA, we did it in 4 months. So that's how much gain and how much productivity now we're gaining our methodology. So -- and obviously, after that is the Auscript. So right now, our directions globally is we're still obviously entertaining a lot of different assets. But because of the significant growth that we set up for 2022, really, we want to focus where we're going to do the biggest lift in terms of restoring our profitability and restoring our gross margin, and that's in the Courts' revenue. That's what right now for the next basically several quarters, you're going to hear the 3 of us, all hands on deck on accelerating those integrations because that's how we get back to profitability moving forward very quickly. And I think in the market that we're in, it's a very important aspect of it.
Our next question comes from Daniel Rosenberg with Paradigm Capital.
I just wanted to follow up on the COVID impact that you mentioned affecting numbers last year. So as the 163 days that were impacted, I was wondering kind of which quarters got impacted most? And maybe just what was the Q4 impact in terms of number of days?
Yes. So that number, Daniel, was really throughout the year. And as we mentioned in the prepared statements, it's been an interesting challenge because while we were out of COVID in one area, then really Australia went back in full lockdown. So we were managing a number of things. But overall, that impact of 163 days was against 254 billing days last year in Australia. So that gives you a sense that there were significant implications on the billing in Australia last year in terms of that.
And what we've seen is basically, we were able to do all the reconciliation financially and the impact was over $1.2 million, just in Australia alone as we exited last year. So we're very pleased that that period of time is behind us. And -- but that's how it came out. 245 days of billing last year in Australia, 163 were negatively impacted. Alexie?
Yes. Just to add to it, Daniel, thanks for your question. Just to add to Sebastien's comment. We haven't quantified it the 163 days quarter-by-quarter, so we don't have that information available right now. But we do know based on our calculation that the 163 days that were negatively impacted amount to approximately $1.2 million for the full year.
Daniel, I'll just add color that we -- across all of the geographies within Australia, there were varying levels of closure. But they didn't have the full opening up from the August closing until about the 15th of November. So you see a rather large impact. And again, Alexie will need to quantify that for you. But I think you remember me saying in my statements of last quarter that they -- the bars were opening on the 15th of November. So we expected some kind of some kind of regain to velocity. And I think so October and November were certainly heavily weighted.
Okay. Second, just turning to the guidance. I didn't see any comment around adjusted EBITDA. I know 10% to 20% has been a target. I was just wondering, have your thoughts changed around that? Are you investing in new initiatives that might take that off the table? Any commentary there?
Yes. So what we've done is really, again, coming out of those 2 years that we wanted to be very conservative in the way we moved forward. We also wanted to take a proactive approach to Q1. And we -- as far as whether or not there's going to be any implication, is there any courts in Australia that could be impacted by some lockdowns during Omicron phases like we wanted to be very, very conservative that way. And that's why we basically took an approach. We're going to focus on the revenue that we know. We've got a good line of sight on. We will incrementally disclose our tracking against organic growth quarter-over-quarter, number two; and then on the other side, basically, we'll be able to show you as we're moving forward, what the implications are for the adjusted EBITDA.
So we're planning to start providing you with a lot more colors as we report Q1, as we go into Q2, but we want to be very conservative monitoring very carefully and really using our actual results to actually provide you with the right guidance as we emerge from Q1 and as we emerge out of Q2. And I think from that perspective, we made it very clear right now, we are returning to profitability. I think you can see from last year, there was a significant amount of onetime expenses that hit the bottom line.
And if you look at the bigger context, we came out of COVID in a relatively good shape operationally. It's just that there's a lot of onetime expenses that were obviously were added to it. So all of this is behind us. All of the COVID restrictions are kind of behind us, but we wanted to make sure that we've got the ability to talk to you, Daniel, about the adjusted EBITDA guidance once Q1's results are in and then we've got kind of at least the first month of Q2 in the bag. So we know exactly where we're trending post a lot of those onetime expenses. So it will be coming your way, just going to be a little bit more incrementally done this year.
Okay. Then in your prepared remarks, Susan, you mentioned a number of partnerships that you had established. So I was curious, which ones are most exciting to you? And then in terms of the pricing, if you were to sell through one of those partnerships, is there any differences in the economics that you accrue from those?
Second question is a good one, and I don't -- they're each structured very, very differently because in one case, with Lexel as an example, we're actually selling their technologies in our bundle in the framework in Florida and in the partnership in Pennsylvania, we're selling our services directly. So it's a little of both.
Certainly, in alignment with partnerships, we're paying them in lieu of distribution. So there is a share gain model, but it differs whether it's our product that they're selling or their products that we're selling. We are most excited about I would say the framework in Florida, not because the other partnerships aren't extraordinary, but because it really gives us a chance to begin to accelerate the court work in the United States. As you know, historically, and you guys have heard me talk about this. We were very resistant to expand that end-to-end portfolio but to really only capitalize on the courts as it relates to the -- as it relates to the capture technologies.
Where we're seeing the demand now in the United States is around the end-to-end solution that will be sold to courts with a major trial we have going on right now in the Midwest as an example, where they are using, it's a current capture customer, but they are using the NetScribe technology and the FirstDraft technology to be able to support losses of internal staffing.
So this framework in Florida gives us an opportunity to accelerate growth and certainly to evangelize what we believe is a very important strategy relative to our competitive position. So I think they're all exciting. They're exciting in different ways, but I think in terms of short-term opportunities to accelerate the investment that we're making in augmenting the technologies to directly impact the court sector, I think that's -- that gets me the most excited. And oh, by the way, it's close, and I get to go talk to customers, which makes me really happy.
[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Brian Kinstlinger with Alliance Global Partners.
I have a few more. I wanted to follow up on the gross margin. First, I think you mentioned it, but I missed what drove the fourth quarter margin to be so much lower than the other 3 quarters of the year. So first, if you'll highlight that one more time? And then with TTA almost complete on this transition and then you're moving to Auscript, should we expect the gross margin in the first half of the year to be at the low end, possibly even lower than the guidance range and then at the upper half of the range in the second half of the year based on this transition schedule?
Susan, do you want to go ahead?
Well, I will say that seasonality certainly affected Q4. And also, as I inferred in my discussion, the timing of the close of the Auscript acquisition really couldn't have been worse. We took on all of the cost and sat with fixed costs in the second half of December where there was really no court activity.
So that, Brian, I would say, is the major driver other than the fact that seasonality does affect our business. It affects the business most profoundly in the month of December and January. And that's not only in Australia, that certainly affects the U.K. court business as well. So that's not new news, right? We've seen that in the trends that you could go back to in Australia in prior Q4 and Q1.
The migration of TTA, we are very excited about. I will caution that we are training a new industry on gross margin. And if we look at the effects of that from historical migrations, it's a little bit of a hockey stick. We are supplementing resources that are trained in the United States and around the world to kind of offset some of that downward trend. We certainly are better at training transcription to be editors today than we were when we went through that first migration. But I think that what we have predicted is that it's not going to be a flash cut.
In order to preserve margin, Brian, what we will do is a slower migration to make sure that the resources are gaining velocity in their productivity as we bring new resources on behind them. We've gotten pretty good at predicting how long it's going to take to get a new editor up to full productivity. So with that, we have a measured migration. So what Seb said, we will start that this quarter. It will certainly -- it will be a measured approach toward how we accelerate or decelerate that as we get the editors up to full productivity.
Great. And then my follow-up is you talked about seasonality, so that was going to be my next part of the question. Can you tell us, based on what is revenue in hand? What's the weakest quarter you expect this year, the strongest quarter? Or any details on the seasonality you said during December, obviously, the weakest. And then the first quarter is 1 day away from being done, maybe it would be helpful to give us some discussion on revenue and margin expectation given we're through the quarter?
Alexie, do you want to go?
Sure. So to answer your question, Brian, in terms of our seasonality, for Q1 is usually our lowest revenue because of what Susan described earlier, the impact of the courts in Australia. And so we expect Q1 to be lowest in terms of trend and then picking up in Q2 and Q3 and then a bit lower in Q4.
In terms of gross margin, we expect gross margin to be within a -- lower in Q1 and increasing as we progress through the year, impacted by the migration of the customers to NetScribe in Australia and the courts customers.
There are no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the conference back over to Sebastien Pare for closing remarks.
Well, thank you, Chantel. Our success as a company continues to be made possible by our global talents. Despite the impact of COVID and the global recovery, labor shortages and great resignation that we all heard about, our global workforce kept the pace in meeting the needs of our clients under very challenging conditions. They continue to achieve critical milestones, demonstrating the resilience, commitment and loyalty of our workforce. I would like to take this occasion to publicly thank each and every one of our employee, editors, software engineers, contractor and partner of VIQ for helping us to remain positioned for success as we exit 2021.
I also like to thank our customers globally for standing by us as we all adjusted to the challenges of mid-2021. You have embraced our technology and the adaptability of our model, and now we're all winning together in what used to be a very strong year ahead of us. At the business level, we enjoy a privileged position with a unique, highly specialized and protected technology platform, a very good revenue visibility in 2022 that will produce positive cash flow as we do so with a strong balance sheet and limited debt. We have a chance to lead in an addressable market that is getting larger every year and all of us get to do extremely important work and complex work.
I thank you for your time today and your time throughout 2021. We look forward to speaking in a few months to review the results of Q1 2022. Please follow up with Laura Kiernan with any questions you might have. Thank you, everyone, for joining us today on the call. Be safe.
This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.