It’s been a phenomenal year of growth here at Priori. As we slow down and take stock of everything we’ve accomplished, we want to say a huge thank you to our clients, network lawyers, investors and the broader community for your support.
We hope you’ll indulge a quick trip through our top 18 Priori moments of 2018 (and if you missed any of this content the first time around, some excellent holiday reading/listening):
1. We hit the ground running in 2018 after raising our Seed Round in December 2017 from Hearst, Great Oaks, Jambhala and others, when we also moved into Hearst Tower. Our co-founders, Basha Rubin and Mirra Levitt, shared their fundraising journey with Law.com where they discussed fundraising while… female, pregnant and running a legal business.
2. In our February event “Fake News” and Digital Platforms, Diego Ibarguen, First Amendment Counsel at Hearst, interviewed Nabiha Syed, Associate General Counsel and VP at Buzzfeed, about First Amendment theories, the characteristics of social media that present novel problems for the First Amendment, and potential solutions to these problems. You can listen to the whole discussion here.
3. We held a roundtable discussion, In-house Lawyering in the Age of #MeToo, led by Priori network employment lawyer Deborah Karpatkin. ICYMI: Deborah wrote her key takeaways here.
4. Basha was named 2018 Women of Legal Tech by the ABA Legal Technology Resource Center along with several other impressive women. See the full list here.
5. We traveled to Las Vegas for Priori’s debut at the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) 2018 Institute in April. You can see our highlights from our CLOC experience here. We’re already gearing up for 2019!
6. In June, we joined several other startups at the HearstLab Showcase to share our progress. Hearing from the other HearstLab founders about how they are building innovative businesses was inspirational, and we are so thankful to be a part of this community.
7. We were accepted into the Plug and Play Enterprise 2.0 program along with a cohort of other B2B tech companies in the professional services space early in 2018. In June, Priori Client Operations Director Jon Karolczak traveled to Sunnyvale, California to pitch at the Summer Summit Demo Day.
8. We published Priori Insights, a three-part deep dive into Priori’s billing data. Part 1 covers the frequency with which fixed fees vs. hourly rates are used in our marketplace; Part 2 looks at the hourly rates of various groups of lawyers; and Part 3 examines how lawyers are compensated based on the number of years they have practiced.
9. Thanks to our friend An Trotter, Senior Director of Legal Operations at the Office of General Counsel at Hearst, Basha and Mirra appeared at the CLOC NYC Chapter Meeting at Hearst to talk about their start-up journey and how marketplaces can drive diversity and innovation for legal departments. They were interviewed by Lisa Burton, Executive Director of HearstLab.
10. We were so thrilled to invite our community to a Summer Celebration at our home in Hearst Tower. It was amazing to see so many of our in-house clients, lawyers and #legaltech friends together in one room!
11. Basha and Mirra were named 2018 Legal Rebels by the ABA Journal. They were selected for Priori’s work using data to improve attorney matches. The article included testimonials from Priori network attorney Marina Warner and HearstLab VP Chris Wilkes.
12. We were honored to interview Richard Susskind, esteemed author, speaker and professor who specializes in the future of professional services, particularly the law, for our blog. Priori’s Client Operations Associate Oliver Duchesne asked hard-hitting questions, and you can find Richard’s answers here (Part 1 & Part 2).
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13. The Summit on Legal Innovation and Disruption (SOLID) held an East Coast conference in September and invited Basha and Mirra to present as part of the Shooting Stars Tech Showcase.
14. Along with several other impressive startup founders, Basha was named 33 Under 33 in the Legal & Accounting category by StrtUpBoost.
15. Mirra presented on the Ethics of Marketplace Models at the New York County Lawyers Association.
16. Priori landed on the shortlist for the 2018 Financial Times Intelligent Business Award for our work reducing legal spend for Hearst. You can read more about the award, as well as the full case study here.
17. In a piece by Law.com’s The American Lawyer about the rising trend of the specialist lawyer, Basha and Mirra weigh in on the growing importance (and risks) of specialist legal expertise through Priori’s platform. Read the full piece here.
18. To finish off the year, we teamed up with LawGeex for a breakfast panel, Scaling Legal: Strategies for Efficiency. In the recap, we give you the top seven takeaways from the event to make your legal department more efficient.
