Learn how and why you should use Priori Marketplace to enhance your legal services options
A legal marketplace has many advantages for buyers in need of legal services. Think of it as a platform like Zillow: You can put in a variety of criteria to perform a search, and then analyze the results and find exactly what fits your needs, whether that is a certain price, location, type of transaction or almost any other data point you would want to use. Companies searching for legal services on Priori Marketplace can find lawyers on our network to handle almost any kind of project. The most common needs fall into four main categories:
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Project based support, whether niche expertise, local counsel or simply searching for cost-effective alternatives
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Overflow support for high-volume company work (commercial contracts, NDAs, healthcare agreements, employment matters, marketing and advertising, data privacy and security, etc.)
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Staffing support, including secondments
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Supporting outside counsel diversity and inclusion initiatives
If your legal department is looking to hire outside counsel, you might be wondering what finding a provider on a legal marketplace looks like, and what the advantages are compared to your other options. Using a legal marketplace is as easy as performing a search. Learn how it works below.
How a Legal Marketplace Works
Priori’s Marketplace partners with the in-house legal teams for companies of all sizes, from Fortune 10 to fast-growing technology companies and everything in between. It provides access to a global vetted network of attorneys at firms of all sizes, from the Am Law 100 to solo practitioners, and alternative legal service providers (ALSPs). Through Priori’s platform, these teams can discover and engage with attorneys from the network, finding the expertise they’re looking for and the flexibility and cost savings they need to achieve their goals. Here are the main aspects of the attorney engagement process:
Global Vetted Network
The groundwork for a successful legal marketplace like Priori Marketplace begins with building a network of attorneys. On Marketplace, you will find a global vetted network of attorneys at firms of all sizes, located in all 50 states and over 55 countries, powered by Priori’s proprietary, data-driven, three-stage technology-enabled vetting process.
RFP Submission
The first step for an in-house team is to submit an RFP through our easy-to-use interactive tool. Once submitted, our technology platform uses the structured data provided by the RFP to identify a short-list of attorneys, firms and/or ALSPs who would be the best-fit for the engagement based on thousands of data points from the lawyers in the network. If appropriate, we run a bidding process for the work, to ensure the most competitive rates.
Proposal
After receiving an RFP, Priori sends a proposal with detailed information about attorney background, expertise, experience and pricing, with a full-suite of marketplace tools available for in-house teams to interview and engage the attorney. Profiles can be compared in a modular system to highlight relevant experience and find the best fit. Within Priori’s Marketplace platform, legal teams can schedule calls or meetings, message attorneys, request project-specific bids, receive formal work proposals and more. For most RFPs, teams will receive a proposal in fewer than 24 hours.
Billing & Invoicing
Once a legal team finds the right provider to accomplish their goals, they can engage that provider through Priori Marketplace. Our billing software and messaging and document-sharing tools enable teams to manage the engagement from beginning to end within our system. The platform also integrates with the leading e-billing software, allowing for seamless integration into legal teams’ existing workflow for invoicing and approvals.
What Are the Benefits of a Legal Marketplace?
While the process of using Priori Marketplace to engage with legal providers is intuitive, the real reason legal teams need it is to improve the quality and efficiency of their external legal services. A legal marketplace model offers a number of benefits for in-house departments looking to address their needs.
Flexibility
A legal marketplace like Priori offers in-house legal departments flexibility in addressing their legal needs in a number of ways. It offers a deep-reaching talent pool that allows in-house departments to source the appropriate attorney(s) no matter how big, small, simple, complex or nuanced the project.
The marketplace model introduces price flexibility and transparency to the legal industry. Attorneys can often bid for work and companies always know what those rates are before entering into a transaction. Marketplaces also support fixed and other alternative fee arrangements.
Additionally, for staffing-style work, companies are not limited to traditional full-time arrangements. While staffing agencies may offer solutions for companies that need someone 40+ hours per week or to fill positions with a guaranteed minimum of 20 or 25 hours a week, a marketplace can address everything from flexible legal talent through to traditional outside counsel representation, at a much lower cost than large law firms.
By offering a wider variety of services, engagement lengths, and price points, a marketplace offers maximum staffing flexibility for in-house legal departments.
Time Saving
Our clients also save significant time in finding and working with lawyers. Using the Priori Marketplace, legal departments can identify legal services according to practice area, project type, rate and more. This means that in-house teams receive a short-list of best-fit providers to review and interview quickly, instead of a cumbersome process of collating referrals. Also, Priori manages the billing and invoice process making it less time-consuming to work with a range of providers.
Scalability
Going hand in hand with flexibility is scalability. The 2020s have already shown dramatic economic ups and downs only a few years in that have significantly impacted hiring needs. From the layoffs of the early pandemic to the Great Resignation a year later and now a looming economic downturn, corporate legal departments’ ability to predict staffing and resource needs has been severely hampered.
A marketplace brings together a powerful, streamlined technology platform and a uniquely vetted legal talent pool to give companies access to the exact resources their legal departments need, when they need them. The marketplace allows in-house departments to quickly scale their resources up and down as needed, with the right legal support at all times.
Cost-Savings
In addition to introducing flexibility into the pricing of legal services, a marketplace model leads to in-house legal departments paying significantly less for those services overall. In the face of budget reductions and impending hiring freezes, a legal marketplace offers corporate legal departments a way to fill their needs with top legal talent at a fraction of normal prices.
On average, companies securing legal services through the Priori Marketplace save 60% over the solutions they were previously using for similar work while maintaining access to the same caliber of talent and expertise. There are a number of factors that contribute to the cost-savings:
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Overall data transparency about rates on the platform
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The bidding process itself reduces hourly rates by 20-30%
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Our network lawyers’ save time on administrative work and business development, reducing overall hourly rates
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Moving lower risk/complexity work away from large law firms
Access to Top Talent
As lawyers forego traditional law firm or corporate jobs in favor of an untethered work experience, legal marketplaces facilitate access to these attorneys for legal departments. Lawyers can work from any location they desire and set their own hours while continuing to earn comparably high levels of income and legal departments can onboard some of the best and brightest in the legal industry. Ultimately, in-house legal departments receive the same level of skill and expertise they are used to from top law firms or through traditional hiring, but at marketplace prices.
On the heels of the Great Resignation and in the shadow of a looming economic downturn, the ability to smartly resource your legal department is more important than ever. Whether you are looking for a long-term secondment, coverage for an ad hoc project or an attorney with niche expertise, Priori can help you find the flexible, scalable, high-caliber coverage you need at a price point that will help you make the most of your current resources. Start an RFP today.
