Learn how corporate legal departments of all sizes achieve their goals with Priori Marketplace
Updated 9/10/2024
When an in-house legal department needs to find a lawyer, they have a lot of options. Often the route they end up going will be dictated by their need. As a legal marketplace, we help legal departments at companies from the Fortune 50 to fast growing tech companies and everything in between achieve their goals. If you’ve heard of Priori but are wondering how we might be able to help your company get legal work done, here are the six most common ways legal teams across the globe use our services.
1. Local Counsel
There are thousands of attorneys in all 50 states and more than 70 countries on the Priori Attorney Network, which means legal departments can use the platform to find a lawyer in jurisdictions where their existing panel firms don’t operate. This can run the gamut from lawsuits in specific jurisdictions or transactions in new countries to opening offices in new physical spaces or dealing with local regulatory compliance. Whether you need a lawyer in Singapore or London or Montana, a legal marketplace can connect you with a vetted lawyer who can represent you on all different kinds of matters.
2. Diversity Targets
Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) are not only part of many corporations' goal setting process, but improving your company’s DEI also has a tangible impact on performance. Some corporations have targets for hitting certain partner minimums for different diversity groups. Over a third of lawyers on the Priori Attorney Network self-identify as being part of an underrepresented group, which is significantly higher than law firm averages. Making the legal profession more diverse is an important mission for us, and we’re proud that many companies can turn to our legal marketplace to create more opportunities to support that mission.
3. Cost Savings
With economic uncertainty putting pressure on legal departments to optimize spending wherever they can, many legal departments use legal marketplaces to lower their costs. On average, Priori Marketplace saves clients 40-75% compared to traditional outside counsel work. When departments find a lawyer through our network, they can save a significant amount on costs compared to existing Big Law firms they might otherwise use. This is in part due to the data-driven technology that matches attorneys with clients through the platform. You can submit an RFP and the technology enables us to quickly match your team with the right lawyer from our network based on the data we collect from your submission. In turn, this allows us to reduce the cost of our services, which means attorneys are making more money on our platform, giving legal departments access to high-quality legal services at significantly lower rates.
4. Niche Expertise
Let’s say you need to find a lawyer who can handle a matter that is atypical or might require a specific type of experience. Using a legal marketplace, you can search for an attorney who may have trained at an AmLaw 100 firm or has several years of in-house experience and also has significant experience with the topic you need. It may be a unique area, such as drone law or copyleft litigation, or it could be something like having appeared in front of an import/export regulatory board or experience negotiating a particular contract against a particular vendor. Priori CEO and Co-Founder Basha Rubin recently spoke to the Financial Times about the impact technology is having in helping legal teams identify niche expertise. She explained that advances such as generative AI are helping legal marketplaces “deliver more information, more quickly, more clearly — and make it more actionable than ever before.”
5. Overflow Support
A very common use of our legal marketplace is overflow support, which is usually lawyers who can work 10-30 hours a week doing the type of work that would otherwise be handled by in-house legal departments if the team had the bandwidth. Legal projects such as commercial contracts, marketing, data privacy, employment, etc. fall into this bucket. You can find a lawyer who will be a resource and can assist your company on an ongoing basis for a flexible amount of time per week. Recent examples of this type of work performed through our platform include an entertainment company that hired three commercial attorneys to support the launch of a new streaming service and a tech company that hired a boutique litigation firm to handle volume small claims litigation.
6. Legal Staffing
Even though Priori Marketplace differs from staffing agencies because of our talent pool and matching process, legal departments can and do use it for traditional staffing engagements that involve temporary placements for things like parental leave, disability or vacation coverage. In addition to our talent pool and data-driven matching technology, our pricing structure is also unique compared to traditional staffing because it is transparent.
If your department needs overflow support, local counsel, niche expertise or even a type of legal services not discussed here, check out the Priori Marketplace and start an RFP today. It’s always free and you’ll receive your list of options curated by our technology and there are no obligations.
