A Note from Priori Co-Founders Basha Rubin & Mirra Levitt
When we founded Priori, the legal industry was abuzz with the untenability of Big Law’s endless cycle of hourly rate increases, and we believed a technology-enabled marketplace could be transformative. We dreamt that there was a way to ensure any business hiring a lawyer could find the right advice at the right price, every time. With today’s addition of RFP, we are completing an end-to-end product suite for companies to do just that.
To tell you why RFP is so important, we need to take you on a brief foray through company history.
2013: We launched our Talent Marketplace, originally targeted at small businesses that need lawyers at fair and transparent prices.
2016-2017: We saw an opportunity to scale significantly with in-house legal teams, who were often managing $100M+ of legal spend. We built our provider network to include 8,000+ solo practitioners, boutique firms, ALSPs and legal operations professionals in all 50 states and 70+ countries. In-house legal teams of fast-growing technology and Fortune 500 companies began using our Talent Marketplace to fill the (vast) gaps left by their big firm partners, whether through flexible talent or more traditional outside counsel. As we grew, companies increasingly have used our Talent Marketplace to “right-source,” moving low-to-medium risk and complexity work away from costly firms and to boutique firms. Still others needed local counsel all over the company and the world. And—flexible talent has become a vital way to manage against an increasingly uncertain geopolitical and economic landscape. We were a unique solution for a range of situations where companies didn’t already know the right lawyers for their needs.
2020-2021: We started to hear from some of our clients that they wanted to be able to do more with the technology we’d built. Could they search all the lawyers they’ve already worked with—often across hundreds of firms—to find exactly the right one? What if they could compare the firms they already work with and the firms in our Talent Marketplace?
That’s why we built our Panel Management software, which now has over 60,000 profiles, powerful search and scorecarding. We started working with some of the largest companies in the world to help them maintain, derive and access insights about their external law firms, facilitating them to negotiate rates, strengthen relationships and make mission-critical decisions over time.
2024: There was still one missing piece: when in-house teams found the right potential firm(s) or attorney(s) through our Panel Management software, what happened next? They often wanted to send an RFP to best optimize for price and strategy and compare how their firms would respond. We sketched out what a single source solution to all outside counsel decisions might look like.
In response to this client demand, we launched an RFP tool into the market earlier this year for a six month trial, and we are thrilled to say it was a resounding success and RFP will now be a permanent part of our product suite.
Now, through Priori, in-house teams can make all of their outside counsel engagement decisions from the first moment a new project comes across your desk.
You can assess whether the right firm or lawyer is already in your trusted panel or network using Panel Management—and, if needed, supplement with new options through our Talent Marketplace—and then use RFP for comprehensive comparison and get started from there.
That sketch has now become a reality. This diagram shows the holistic vision we have Priori as a one-stop solution for outside counsel selection and hiring:
We are now closer than ever to a reality where data and technology can make sure that you’re hiring the right lawyer at the right price every time. Thank you for being part of our journey.
Warmly,
Basha Rubin & Mirra Levitt
Co-Founders
