Case Study: Interview with Erin Abrams, General Counsel at Via

We needed extra support on our legal team at Via but couldn’t quite justify the budget to bring another person on full-time yet. A colleague of mine who is also in-house at a technology company in NYC had used Priori previously and found the experience remarkably positive. I had also been aware of Priori from their blog and email newsletter, which I found to be very relevant and interesting. 

As Via has grown, our legal team’s workload expanded, but we didn’t have enough in-house lawyers to do all the work and didn’t want to outsource day-to-day commercial legal matters to outside counsel. As such, we needed to bring someone on who could work in a part-time and flexible manner to handle NDAs, engagement letters, vendor service agreements and commercial contracts. 

We also used Priori following the imposition of the federal government’s travel ban early last year. We offered to assist with identifying legal resources for affected members of the Via community. Not only did Priori enable us to identify a roster of reasonably priced immigration practitioners, but Priori also helped us find a great lawyer to come in and provide an informational session for Via drivers on the legal ramifications of the ban.

In my experience, Priori’s vetting process is much more thorough than other legal staffing agencies that I have used in the past at my prior jobs. As a result, the caliber of lawyers recommended by Priori is much higher.  Another benefit of using Priori was how specific we could make our hiring requirements. For instance, we needed lawyers with particular expertise who had also worked in technology environments. With Priori, you can really tailor your outside counsel and temp attorney hiring in a way that best suits your needs.

We will probably keep using Priori in a similar way to what we have been doing, particularly with overflow commercial contracts work. Additionally, as we keep growing, we’ll use Priori to help us find people who can come on board short-term and fill the gaps that arise as we build out our team. We’ll also use Priori for finding lawyers with specific subject matter expertise, particularly in IP and technology contracts and transactions.

Priori enabled us to get a level of support we would have had a hard time finding otherwise. A comparable attorney at a big law firm would have been approximately five times as much, which obviously would have been cost prohibitive. 

Any company that needs to find a top attorney but either doesn’t have the time to go through the process of hiring someone full time or the budget to outsource to outside counsel at really high billing rates. Priori’s platform allows legal departments to find top quality lawyers quickly and at discounted rates.