Case Studies
When I think about how to resource a legal department—especially in a dynamic, high-growth startup of the sort that I’m a part of—it’s my sense that just waiting until there’s a fire that needs to be put out in an area where you don’t have capacity is not the right approach.
Instead, you should be looking around the bend to see what kinds of legal issues are likely to arise—especially in areas where you have gaps in your capability—and the frequency and cadence at which they’ll arise as you take on different initiatives and reposition your business. If you’re doing that work of looking forward and around the corner, you can develop an assessment of what skills you need to bring onto the team and when. Of course, that kind of advance work rarely aligns with an increase in legal budget that enables a new FTE hire.
So having Priori in your pocket is kind of like a superpower. You’re able to ratchet up your capability and expand your expertise in a way doesn’t require you to commit to long-term spend. Then, if you like what you’ve found, you can increase the work you’re giving to that person and even expand their portfolio consistent with their skill set. I find that to be extraordinarily valuable in a world in which we have limited budgets and an uncertain future.
I think about Priori more and more as a bigger factor in terms of how we think about allocating our resources. There are two reasons: I’ve been very impressed by the caliber of people we’ve seen through the platform and it gives us a lot of flexibility.
When I think about Priori as a strategic partner, I think about flexibility. It gives us a tremendous amount of flexibility when you have constraints on resources—like we all do. It’s very hard to predict what’s going to happen over the course of the year. There are always things that arise, whether it’s additional big partnerships, disputes or litigation.
When something comes up that requires more resourcing than you have at hand, the first place to turn is often outside counsel, which can be incredibly expensive. Having a relationship with Priori and a number of lawyers across the platform with different expertise gives me an amazing amount of cost-effective flexibility and it allows us to add people to the team in a seamless way.
My goal is to have a number of people that are familiar enough with our company that as we see ups and downs and new matters come in, we can quickly dial people up and have them contribute in a seamless way. Based on the success we’ve had, I think Priori will be an even bigger part of our planning moving
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Under the traditional model, when I hire an attorney from a temp agency, their goal is to come in, make money and roll off a project. They're not invested in learning about my company or the people that they're working with. There's no intent to create a relationship and that impacts the quality of the work.
As someone who manages staffing from a budgeting and headcount perspective, when you can have an external person come in and act like a full-time employee, there’s tremendous value. With Priori attorneys, that’s what you get. It’s like having an employee starting with your company, or a seconded attorney from your outside counsel, who knows your business and is invested in the quality of the work.
Vonage is a global cloud communications company that helps businesses accelerate their digital transformation. They turned to Priori Marketplace to find flexible resources for various types of legal work, including local counsel and overflow support, and to drive cost savings overall.
Carol Hopperton, Legal Chief of Staff at Vonage, joined the company in 2019 to set up Legal Operations and brought her background in working for fast-growing technology companies to the agile legal team at Vonage. One of her most important goals in taking over the role four years ago was scaling the sales-supporting legal function at the company.
“You’re in kind of a quandary in legal because everything that sales needs, they want it now,” she explains. “And there’s this general expectation that you’ll take whatever volume comes in and be able to support it now. So for us, it’s really about trying to map our legal resources onto the business.” Hopperton’s background with technology companies informed her perspective on legal resourcing. “I’m always trying to understand where we’re spending our dollars, how we’re spending them and how to spend them most effectively by embracing better processes, better technology and better legal services. I try to run legal like it’s my business.”
Hopperton succinctly summarizes the challenge she runs into: “How do we right size the team? How do we put together a really agile, dynamic team that can flex and be able to support peaks without adding to our team size?”
When she received a recommendation to check out Priori, it provided an intriguing opportunity to answer these questions.
“I was looking for an additional flexible contract resource to supplement our team,” she says. “I also wanted to figure out how we could start to embrace contract managers so that we were using our seasoned attorneys to do the really complex, high value work rather than churn out NDAs, for example. I wanted to embrace people who were enthusiastic about working with technology solutions in their everyday provision of legal services and different ways of working because you want to make sure they’re going to thrive in your environment. Essentially, I was looking to fill some gaps and really enhance our support and coverage in terms of location and volume so that we could take a breath—the volume was so high that the team was constantly chasing their tails.”
Relationships are so important on both sides of the house. We need that dependability, the follow-through. At the beginning of all relationships, as we know only too well, there's that “getting to know you” space. We are an organization with a lot of attorneys. We have approximately 425 attorneys on staff. They know what they want and everything that they want, they want it last week. So it takes a while to get into the groove of working with a partner that understands that. With Priori, the turnaround time is excellent and the candidates are strong. That's really what we need when we are looking for a lawyer to plug a hole right then and there.
One example is our vendor agreement. We have some items that we’re not very flexible on. Priori said, we want to partner with you, let’s see what we can do to make this partnership work. Finding companies that want to build partnerships like this is lacking today. To me, it shouldn’t be either party adapting on their own, it’s more: How can we meet halfway, so it works for all parties? And that was a willingness that Priori had from the onset of our relationship. Everybody who we worked with asked, “What can we do?,” “How can we make it work?” That is probably the single thing that impressed me with Priori, the core values and operating model of let’s figure this out together.
With more than a decade of experience in in-house roles, Andy has worked at companies with legal teams of many different sizes. In this Q&A, he discusses how he’s used Priori Marketplace throughout his career.
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.
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.
Anchorage Digital, a global digital asset platform for institutions, with the first federally chartered digital asset bank, needed flexible support for legal issues in the crypto industry, and turned to Priori for overflow support and niche expertise.
As a key player in crypto, Anchorage Digital is the first stop for digital asset projects and works with institutional clients of all types, from asset owners, wealth managers and funds to banks and fintechs. When she came on as General Counsel of Anchorage Digital, Georgia Quinn needed access to attorneys who understand the crypto market and can work flexibly with their “business hats” on.
“When I became General Counsel at Anchorage Digital and I had to start staffing my team, being able to have flexibility to bring more people on or get more hours was really important because I did not need full-time headcount,” she explains. “I think that’s the same for a lot of startups that are in nascent spaces, where you don't have your market fully defined yet. As a result, you're hesitant to hire a full-time, salaried employee. It's hard to make that full commitment to an employee because there's this uncertainty—you're not sure what the future workload is going to be.”
I chose Priori because I was looking for cost savings off of traditional outside counsel for legal advice in a number of areas. I have been particularly impressed with Priori because the quality of attorneys is the same or better than our usual attorneys at larger firms, which, given how selective we normally are, says a lot!
I really didn’t think I needed a third party to help me find a lawyer – I thought I knew enough people to do it myself. But within 30 minutes of contacting Priori, they had scheduled three attorney interviews for me, something I never would have been able to do myself. Booking appointments on the Priori platform was seamless and delightful. They had thought through every detail, including providing a pre-arranged conference number.
There was one lawyer we particularly clicked with, and the next day we were on our way, negotiating the deal.
Priori has saved us quite a bit of time and money, and it allows us to easily find, and receive advice from, experts in many different areas. In particular, quick responses from attorneys on Priori’s platform, clear communication from the Priori team, and transparent billing make Priori my default when I’m looking for niche expertise, local counsel or simply cost savings compared to more traditional firm solutions.
We needed extra support on our legal team at Via but couldn’t quite justify the budget to bring another person on full-time yet. A colleague of mine who is also in-house at a technology company in NYC had used Priori previously and found the experience remarkably positive. I had also been aware of Priori from their blog and email newsletter, which I found to be very relevant and interesting.
As Via has grown, our legal team’s workload expanded, but we didn’t have enough in-house lawyers to do all the work and didn’t want to outsource day-to-day commercial legal matters to outside counsel. As such, we needed to bring someone on who could work in a part-time and flexible manner to handle NDAs, engagement letters, vendor service agreements and commercial contracts.
We also used Priori following the imposition of the federal government’s travel ban early last year. We offered to assist with identifying legal resources for affected members of the Via community. Not only did Priori enable us to identify a roster of reasonably priced immigration practitioners, but Priori also helped us find a great lawyer to come in and provide an informational session for Via drivers on the legal ramifications of the ban.
In my experience, Priori’s vetting process is much more thorough than other legal staffing agencies that I have used in the past at my prior jobs. As a result, the caliber of lawyers recommended by Priori is much higher. Another benefit of using Priori was how specific we could make our hiring requirements. For instance, we needed lawyers with particular expertise who had also worked in technology environments. With Priori, you can really tailor your outside counsel and temp attorney hiring in a way that best suits your needs.