Clinical, regulatory, and commercial work covered by 5–10 attorneys at $250–$350 an hour, with several engagements running for years.
At a Glance
- Company: Publicly traded life sciences enterprise
- Team: Lean in-house legal department
- The work: Clinical trial agreements, vendor contracts, and other recurring “run-the-company” legal work
- Engagement: 5–10 attorneys with life sciences in-house and law firm backgrounds, scaling hours up or down with demand
- Rates: Typically $250–$350/hour, compared with $1,000+/hour at their existing firms
- Outcome: Significant volume shifted away from traditional outside counsel, with several engagements continuing for multiple years
The Capacity Gap
A publicly traded life sciences company with a lean in-house team was struggling to keep up with core “run-the-company” legal work: clinical trial agreements, vendor contracts, and the steady stream of commercial and regulatory matters that keep a life sciences business moving. None of it was novel or bet-the-company work. All of it required specialized fluency, and all of it needed to get done on time.
That combination is the trap many teams keep falling into. The work is too specialized to hand to a generalist, too high-volume to send to a firm at $1,000+ an hour, and too variable to staff with permanent hires. Demand didn’t arrive on a schedule; it moved with trial timelines, vendor cycles, and business development activity. In slow stretches, a full-time hire would sit underused. In a surge, two hires still wouldn’t be enough. The team was left absorbing the overflow itself, the most expensive and least sustainable option of all, paid for in nights, weekends, and deferred priorities.
Why the Usual Options Didn’t Fit
The work was steady enough to demand dedicated attention, but it didn’t match any of the standard ways of getting legal work done.
- Hire full-time. The volume didn’t justify multiple permanent roles, and it wouldn’t stay level long enough to keep them fully utilized. Every hire is a bet on a demand curve that, here, kept moving.
- Send it to the firms. At $1,000+ an hour, routing high-volume, recurring work to outside counsel meant paying premium rates for work that didn’t call for a premium. The economics broke down long before the work ran out.
- Absorb it internally. The team was already at capacity. Pushing more onto them traded a budget problem for a retention-and-burnout problem.
What they needed wasn’t more of any one option. It was a different model entirely: capacity that flexed with demand, carried real life sciences expertise, and cost something proportional to the work.
A Flexible Bench Built Around Demand
The company partnered with Priori to build a flexible bench of experienced life sciences attorneys. At any given time, they engaged 5–10 lawyers with relevant in-house and law firm backgrounds, spanning the clinical, regulatory, and commercial work the business generated. Rather than a rotating cast of temporary help, the bench functioned as a stable, embedded extension of the in-house team: lawyers who knew the company’s contracts, counterparties, and risk posture, and who could scale their hours up or down as demand moved.
Because every attorney already carried life sciences experience, there was no long ramp. They could pick up a clinical trial agreement or a regulatory question and move, without the in-house team spending its scarce time teaching the basics. And because the bench was sized for the company’s peaks rather than its averages, a surge in volume didn’t trigger a renegotiation or a scramble for coverage. The capacity was already there, and it pulled back just as easily when things quieted down.
Lower Costs, Greater Capacity
At rates typically between $250 and $350 an hour, the company gained the same specialized coverage it had been paying more than $1,000 an hour to get from its firms, a difference that compounded fast across high-volume, recurring work. The savings were the headline, but the operational gains ran deeper.
Responsiveness improved, because capacity was available before it was needed rather than negotiated after. Continuity improved, because the same attorneys stayed with the business across matters and years, accumulating institutional knowledge that a rotating firm associate never could. And the in-house team got its time back, reclaiming the strategic, high-judgment work that actually required their seat instead of drowning in volume that didn’t.
Over time, several of these relationships evolved into multi-year engagements. That longevity is its own proof point. The attorneys became fluent in the company’s playbook, faster and more reliable with every matter, and increasingly hard to distinguish from the in-house team itself. It’s the compounding return a lower hourly rate alone can’t buy, and the part traditional outside counsel, for all its cost, was never structured to deliver.
Facing a similar gap?
If your team is sending recurring, specialized work to firms at rates the work doesn’t warrant, or absorbing overflow it doesn’t have the capacity to hold, a flexible bench may be a better fit than either option you’re weighing.
