Q: What was your first introduction to Priori?
I was a user early. At a previous company, I needed a simple set of things done—nothing super complex—and Priori helped me locate a firm that was really, really effective. The company was growing in Europe and I needed help and asked a question of a large law firm we worked with and the cost was expensive, while the work wasn’t necessarily differentiated. So I went to Priori, and found a really good firm formed by lawyers who had come from bigger firms. They were headquartered in Wales and had a big office in London. They understood exactly what we needed done. We had subsidiaries in multiple countries that weren’t large but they needed attention. The firm had partners who spoke the language and understood the different sensibilities of the different countries, and when you’re dealing with corporate and employment issues, those things matter. And over the years, our relationship with the firm scaled for that very reason.
Q: What impressed you about the platform?
It was a really effective way for me to find a firm that was pre-vetted and had partners with really good experience who were able to help us with issues at rates that were attainable for my company at the time. We were a company still in growth mode and so paying attention to where we were spending dollars made a lot of sense and it is a really sensible way to go about finding a law firm. I think the upfront diligence that Priori did on that firm to understand that it’s a firm that was going to be appealing to lots of in-house teams at certain stages of growth was really the first thing that convinced me: There’s something here. I could see how when you put the tech behind this idea, it can scale.
“It was a really effective way for me to find a firm that was pre-vetted and had partners with really good experience who were able to help us with issues at rates that were attainable.”
Q: How do you use Priori?
The platform can be useful in a bunch of different ways. I think the main reason I come to Priori is when I have something that is not necessarily board-level visibility or mission critical whereby the actual name of the law firm matters. Then, I open up the aperture on what kinds of firms I can bring in and where I can get value. Priori allows you to get value from places where you might not have known how to find a lawyer that does a very specific thing that you might need, which could be very business dependent. For example, I was in a company where we had a development team based out of Russia and I really needed counsel that understood some of the employment rules in Russia and I was already working on the corporate side with a large firm, but the issues that I needed answers to were too lightweight to spend that kind of money with that kind of firm. I need to be more practical with my spend and Priori helped me find a firm that resolved some key issues quickly and efficiently ahead of a fundraise and after the financing closed.
Q: What are some of the considerations you look at when making outside counsel decisions?
One is the size and scale of your legal department. Who do you have and what have you decided to insource versus outsource? I’m a big “do it inside the company if you can” person, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t projects that just take too long or require too much time and will be done slowly if I tried to do it myself or the team tries to manage it themselves. For example, recently I used Priori to help with legal operations and standing up a contracts lifecycle platform and that involved looking at a lot of contracts and I needed help from someone that knows their way around contracts because of the volume involved.
There are also matters where I think you need to have great attorneys but it doesn’t really matter what firm they’re at. Maybe it’s routine work like trademark issues if you’re not a trademark-heavy company, labor and employment issues or even some IP issues. You want a great attorney but you don’t necessarily need the breadth of a large firm to do the work. You can find that with Priori.
Q: How do you usually search for outside counsel?
I have a network of GCs and chief privacy officers that I go to for my own sticky questions. So, if it’s a certain type of matter, I’ll ask them for the first recommendation, but that doesn’t always fit what you need. And sometimes you need more than one recommendation. So there are a lot of different sources, and attorneys and firms that I really like for certain things, but there are still opportunities that arise where I don’t have a go-to firm or attorney, and Priori represents a way to have access to more capabilities there. Sometimes you actually need a person that is going to get into your Slack threads and talk to other people in your business.
You need a fast, expedited process to get someone on board to do a project quickly and efficiently. If you can do projects efficiently, that is a massive win. With Priori, I can get a list of six quality people, talk to two of them and find the right person really, really quickly. I don’t know if there’s a substitute for that. Everything is there in the platform and it’s intuitive. You push a button, get the person and you’re up and running to get help with your business. That can’t be understated.
“Everything is there in the platform and it’s intuitive. You push a button, get the person, and you’re up and running to get help with your business.”
