This is the first in a three-part series on how Priori and its AI agent, Scout, put your data and your rules of engagement behind every stage of an outside counsel decision:
- Inside Scout’s Agents: Matter Intake and Law Firm Discovery
- Inside Scout’s Agents: RFP Creation and Recipient Selection
- Inside Scout’s Agents: Pricing Comparison and Response Analysis
Priori is the pricing and allocation platform for outside counsel, system-agnostic, connected to your own data, and built to put your company’s rules of engagement behind every decision about where legal work goes and what it should cost. It sits on top of the systems you already run, so your eBilling and matter data flow straight in, and its AI agent, Scout, carries your data and your rules through each stage of a matter without asking you to re-enter the same facts as the work moves forward. This series follows a single matter across three phases, and this first piece covers the earliest one, the pre-RFP work of deciding how a matter should be handled and, when it calls for outside firms, finding the right ones to consider.
Everything downstream depends on getting this phase right, because a matter that is routed sensibly and matched to well-chosen firms enters every later stage on a clean footing, while a matter that is mishandled at the start forces every stage after it to compensate for a decision that should have gone differently.
The Intake Agent
Every new matter begins with the same quiet question of where it should go, and getting the answer right means the work is resourced sensibly, while getting it wrong means you have either overspent on something routine or under-resourced something that genuinely mattered. There are four paths in front of you, since a matter can be handled internally, sent out to an RFP, matched through a firm search, or routed to an alternative provider, and the correct one depends on spend, practice area, risk, geography, urgency, and how your department has decided work like this should be sourced.
The day-to-day problem
Routing is where policy and reality most often part ways, because your department may have a clear rule that matters over a certain value go out to competitive bid and that certain practice areas always go to panel, and yet the person triaging the matter is moving fast while the rule sits in a document. The matter goes where matters like it have always gone, and the exception that should have triggered a different process slips through unnoticed. The cost of that stays invisible until later, when a matter that should have been kept in-house has already gone to a premium firm, or one that warranted competitive pricing has gone straight to an incumbent at full rate.
How the Intake Agent works
Priori’s Intake Agent is built for exactly this first decision, so you describe the matter or upload what you have, and it runs a guided intake conversation, inferring what it reasonably can from your description and asking you to confirm anything uncertain. It reads what you have given it, extracts the details it can reasonably infer, and flags the ones it is unsure about for you to confirm, so you skip the questions you have already answered and spend attention only where a real judgment is needed. It weighs the factors that actually drive routing, including expected legal spend, practice area, matter type, risk, sensitivity, business impact, geography, jurisdiction, urgency, and the specialized expertise a matter requires, and where comparable historical billing data exists, it can factor that in and ground the recommendation in what similar matters have actually cost you. It then recommends a clear next step and briefly explains why.
The agent applies your department’s logic rather than a default, so your thresholds define what counts as high spend or urgent, your hard rules govern the matter types that always route one way regardless of other factors, and your priority order determines the tie-breaker when two factors point to different outcomes. Whatever the conversation captures then carries straight into the next workflow, so no one re-enters the same matter details twice.
Why the AI matters here specifically
Routing is a genuinely multi-variable decision, and that is precisely where an AI layer earns its keep, because a human triaging quickly tends to anchor on one salient factor, usually the practice area or the firm that first comes to mind, and lets the rest fade into the background. The Intake Agent holds all of the factors at once and applies your priority order deliberately every time, including on the busy Friday afternoon when a person would have shortcut it, so the advantage comes from consistency in a place where human attention naturally wavers.
The Law Firm Discovery Agent
When intake routes a matter toward a firm search or an RFP, the requirements it has begun to establish need to become a real, structured search across your panel, and that is the work the Law Firm Discovery Agent takes on.
The day-to-day problem
Finding the right firm ought to be an evidence exercise, and yet in practice it becomes a memory exercise, because the requirements are clear in the requester’s head while translating them into a real search across admissions, practice areas, firm size, prior matters, and your own internal tags takes time nobody has. The search collapses into a question of who you already know, and strong firms with the right track record never surface because no one thought of them. The deeper cost shows up as inconsistency, since two people searching for the same kind of firm start from scratch and land in different places when the criteria live in their heads rather than in the system.
How the Law Firm Discovery Agent works
Scout’s Law Firm Discovery Agent does the translation for you, so you describe what you need in plain language and it turns your request into structured search filters across practice area, location and jurisdiction, bar and court admissions, industry, firm size, certifications and memberships, your own workspace firm tags, prior matter experience, and recommendation score.
The intelligence lives in the interpretation rather than the filtering, because when you say you would ideally like industry experience, the agent understands that as a preference that should shape the ranking rather than a requirement that excludes every firm without it, and when you say a firm must be admitted in New York, it treats that as a hard filter. Getting that distinction right is the whole game, and it is precisely what breaks down when a person builds a search by hand under time pressure, because preferences get promoted to requirements and strong firms get filtered out for missing a nice-to-have.
Scout summarizes the proposed criteria back to you for review before it does anything with them, so you can see exactly how your request was interpreted and correct it if the AI drew the line in the wrong place, and only once you confirm does it save the search. What you get is a reusable, reviewable search that your team can return to, refine, and rerun as the matter evolves or a similar one comes along.
Why the AI matters here specifically
The benefit reaches beyond speed, though turning a sentence into a structured search in seconds is real value on its own, because the larger gain is that the search becomes legible. The AI states its interpretation back to you, showing which criteria it treated as required, which it treated as preferences, and what field of firms resulted, so the logic of the search stays visible and adjustable rather than locked in one person’s head, which turns a private judgment call into a repeatable, reviewable process the whole team can stand behind.
Why this phase matters, and where the series goes next
The pre-RFP phase is where your rules of engagement either run or get skipped, because intake is the moment a matter enters the right process by default and discovery is where firm selection stops living in a few people’s heads and becomes explicit, reviewable, and repeatable. Handled well, this phase produces two things that every later stage inherits, which are a matter routed correctly and a defensible, structured record of which firms belong in the running and why.
Those same requirements carry forward without being rebuilt, because when a matter calls for competitive sourcing, the criteria that drove the search travel into the RFP itself. That is where the next blog picks up, following the matter into the RFP phase, where Scout builds the request firms can actually answer and assembles the invite list you can defend.
Sign up for our product demo on September 23 to see it all in action.
