We’re pleased to introduce Sarah Fercho, Sr. Director, Advisory Services, who will be joining Priori to support clients using our RFP and panel management software.
Sarah brings more than two decades of Fortune 50 experience with a focus on legal operations, most recently as Director of Legal Affairs Strategy & Operations at Target. In that role, she was responsible for outside counsel management, RFPs, panel governance, pricing and rate negotiations, legal technology, eDiscovery, and enterprise AI initiatives. Over the course of her career, she worked closely with legal, finance, procurement, compliance, and business partners to design and operate programs that support outside counsel selection and management in large, complex organizations.
Her work has consistently involved helping legal teams manage how decisions are made, revisited, and refined over time as organizational needs change.
In Sarah’s words: “My new role as the Senior Director of Advisory Services is an exciting continuation of my career and I am honored to do it with this incredible team. I knew from the moment I started working with them as a client that they not only had software that would immediately add value to our outside counsel programs, but that the team behind it was the real magic.”
Experience Grounded in Long-Term Ownership
At Target, Sarah led teams responsible for the full lifecycle of outside counsel engagement, including intake, firm selection, RFP design and execution, panel strategy, pricing discipline, and ongoing performance oversight. These programs evolved over time as the business changed, new types of matters emerged, and expectations around cost, transparency, and consistency increased.
Panel structures and RFP processes needed to support a wide range of work while remaining understandable and usable across the organization. Decisions were often revisited well after they were made, sometimes because priorities shifted and sometimes because new information surfaced. Much of the work involved refining existing frameworks rather than rebuilding them from scratch, with an emphasis on keeping programs practical and durable.
Earlier in her career, Sarah also led third-party risk management and legal operations technology initiatives. Those experiences shaped how she approaches vendor governance and accountability, and how she thinks about the role of systems in supporting decision-making over time rather than at a single point.
Why Move to Legal Technology
After years spent leading legal operations from inside a large organization, Sarah began to reflect more closely on the role technology plays in how legal teams manage outside counsel over time.
Much of her work involved implementing legal technology, aligning people and processes around those tools, and living with the results well beyond initial rollout. She saw where systems supported decision-making effectively and where they struggled to keep pace as work evolved, teams changed, and expectations increased.
That experience shaped her interest in working closer to the technology itself. Not as a departure from legal operations, but as a continuation of it. Supporting legal teams at scale often means influencing how tools are designed, implemented, and used in practice, particularly when those tools sit at the center of high-impact decisions.
“I spent a lot of time working with technology from the user side, adjusting processes to fit what the tools could support. Over time, I became more interested in how those tools could better reflect how legal teams actually operate.”
In moving into a role supporting legal technology, Sarah brings the perspective of someone who has owned these programs for years and understands what happens after implementation, when tools meet real-world constraints and competing priorities.
Supporting Legal Teams in Practice
Many legal teams today are focused on how to manage outside counsel programs in a way that remains workable as complexity increases. Questions often arise around how to maintain consistency while allowing for flexibility, how to evaluate firms across different types of matters, and how to respond when decisions are reviewed or questioned internally.
Sarah has worked through these challenges directly, managing programs at scale and supporting legal teams as they adjusted their approach over time. Her perspective reflects an understanding of how outside counsel decisions play out in practice, including the operational and organizational considerations that tend to surface after a selection has been made.
“What mattered most was having a process people could understand and come back to later, even when circumstances changed.”
In her role at Priori, Sarah will work with clients to help them apply those learnings as they use RFP and panel management tools within their own organizations. Her focus will be on change management, supporting teams as they adapt their processes, think through tradeoffs, and make decisions that hold together over time.
Sarah’s Role at Priori
As Sr. Director, Advisory Services, Sarah will work directly with clients using Priori’s software, drawing on her experience running large-scale legal operations programs to support how RFPs and panels are implemented in practice.
She will collaborate closely with clients and internal teams to help ensure that tools are being used in ways that reflect how legal departments actually operate. This includes sharing perspective on how programs evolve, where friction commonly arises, and how teams can adjust their approach as needs change.
She will also contribute to ongoing conversations with the legal community through content, events, and discussions focused on the practical realities of outside counsel selection and governance.
Priori CEO and Co-Founder, Basha Rubin, says, “Sarah’s deep experience managing outside counsel and RFP programs will be an extraordinary asset to Priori’s clients. We’re thrilled to have her join the team.”
Looking Ahead
Outside counsel management continues to evolve as legal teams manage broader portfolios of work and greater visibility into how decisions are made. Supporting that work requires experience that reflects the realities of operating at scale.
Sarah’s background brings that perspective into how Priori supports clients. We’re glad to have her joining the team and look forward to the conversations and work ahead.
