As we’re gearing up for our summer 2013 launch, I want to take this time to tell you a little bit about why I decided to found Priori. I am an attorney-turned-entrepreneur, native New Yorker and have an overpowering and relentless urge to question constantly and try to improve everything I see. (Sorry, friends and strangers, for all the unsolicited advice over the years!)
I am committed to making the legal marketplace more efficient and expanding the range of customers well-served by the market. For large companies and wealthy individuals, ‘big law’ provides high-quality services. For the indigent, there are many excellent public interest organizations that attract talented, dedicated lawyers.
But the rest of the market is fragmented—and often confusing for consumers.
Small law firms and small businesses struggle to find each other, and small businesses don’t know how to evaluate the quality of potential lawyers or divine a fair price for services. The results are bad for everyone: small businesses defer seeking vital legal advice, often until problems are unavoidable and legal costs skyrocket.
Priori Legal is my answer to a fragmented and inefficient market. I’m extremely excited to share our service with all of you, and even more excited to hear what you think of it.
Priori is a simple online platform that connects smalls businesses with a network of trusted attorneys in NYC. We house all your legal needs under one virtual roof, and we can connect you with experts to address any situation that arises. Because we are repeat players with the lawyers in our network, we are able to negotiate the types of deals usually reserved for long-term, repeat clients. We also work with attorneys to incentivize flat fee services, so you can budget around your legal needs rather than their becoming a looming x-factor. Finally, we take the ‘trusted’ piece of our tagline seriously: we interview and check legal references for every single lawyer in our network.
I am often asked why I decided to leave traditional legal work to start Priori. At Yale Law School, I realized that I could maximize my impact by creating a company, rather than a legal practice because the problems facing the legal market were so systemic. The legal market is broken, and I want to be at the vanguard of the effort to find a solution.’
Watch this space for updates about Priori, other interesting companies in the legal space or making similar disruptive changes in other spaces, inspirational lawyers, commentary on developments in the legal framework that governs companies such as ours and from time to time, perhaps, an off-topic diatribe—what kind of blog would we be without that!.
(Oh, and P.S. if you’re wondering about the name. Priori means ‘before’. If you use legal services before you encounter a problem, you’ll save time and money. Our name is meant as a constant reminder to hire a lawyer now rather than kick the can down the road.)
