alt.legal: Can Basha Rubin And Priori Redefine How We Buy Legal?

If this vision gets adopted broadly, this could redefine lawyer prestige, and recast the objectives of Biglaw branding.

This year, in the pages of alt.legal we have talked at length about Biglaw prestige and the disruptive potential of technology.

Today, we explore a legal technology company with a bold vision: to allow companies to use a single platform to reach across geographies and practice areas to find the best lawyers, wherever they are, and whatever firm they work in.  Backed by those delicious metrics that the CLOC crowd covets, this company wants corporate legal departments to use the most effective lawyers a la carte!

To learn about this potentially game-changing model, we interview Basha Rubin, CEO and founder of Priori.  Basha is not your typical legal entrepreneur. Having skipped the Biglaw path altogether after law school, she cut right to a path of risk and disruption (awesome!).

Priori has been her passion project since Yale Law (a law school so elite, even other Ivy League law grads cower in its presence). Unlike many of the legal entrepreneurs I’ve interviewed (who will claim until their last breath that they loved practicing law, but . . . ), Basha realized quickly and admits loudly that she was not temperamentally suited to the practice of law. Having spent some real time with her, I’d put it another way — she simply is too energetic to be pinned down to a computer writing the tenth draft of that second amended complaint!

But, today, Basha harnesses that energy and comfortability with risk to conquer the terrifying world of entrepreneurship.  So what does she hope to achieve with Priori? Nothing crazy, she simply hopes to create an entirely new way for in-house counsel to directly source the best lawyers from within firms.

To me, if this vision gets adopted broadly (and read below, some big clients are biting), this could redefine lawyer prestige, and recast the objectives of Biglaw branding. Enjoy!

Joe Borstein: So you are the first legal entrepreneur I’ve interviewed from Yale Law for Above the Law.  Tell me about how you got this business started?

Sponsored

Basha Rubin: I’m definitely not the only, and the list is growing! Laura Safdie (Casetext), Doug Rand (Boundless), Michael Bloom (Praktio), and obviously David Lat (Breaking Media) represent just a small sampling of some of the amazing entrepreneurs Yale Law School has graduated (and whose friendship and advice I appreciate).

That said, my learning curve was steep. When I first began working on Priori, I wrote a “business plan,” which was actually a 30-page treatise on the history of legal insurance and prepaid legal plans in the U.S. and Europe… From that experience, I learned the sheer breadth of my ignorance, a lesson that has proved useful time and again in building Priori over the last years.

JB: How did the business evolve?

BR: Today, Priori is a marketplace for in-house counsel to find, hire, and manage top attorneys without the costly infrastructure of a firm. When we first launched, we were focused on small businesses and fixed-fee services. While our customers loved the service, we found that we were getting more demand from in-house departments that needed a more sophisticated technology solution.

So in the spring of 2016, we pivoted and relaunched the business. We’ve seen significant adoption and are proud to count Via, Artsy, Macmillan and, most recently, Hearst among our clients.

Sponsored

JB: Tell me about the Hearst relationship.

BR: So much serendipity! My co-founder (and another Yale Law grad!) Mirra Levitt and I were fundraising, and we wanted an investor with a legal background who could add value strategically and operationally. We came across a Wall Street Journal article about Eve Burton’s (Hearst’s then General Counsel and now Chief Legal Officer) fund, HearstLab, that invests in women-led companies.  That sounded ideal, but we didn’t have a warm-intro, so we filled out their online intake form thinking it would go nowhere. We were so wrong: Eve and her team, Chris Wilkes and Lisa Burton, understood the business and saw the potential immediately. They invested in us, and we are now embedded in Hearst’s Office of General Counsel. It’s an opportunity of unquantifiable value. Not only do we work just feet away from our investor, Hearst’s lawyers are our clients, product-testers and brand sounding-boards. As we’re scaling, we couldn’t ask for a better partner.

JB: What is your vision of the future for Priori?

BR: I think the marketplace will usurp the firm as the primary delivery mechanism of legal services in the United States (though my thesis is that Biglaw is not going anywhere anytime soon). We (and other alternative service providers) can provide many of the benefits of a firm, but much more nimbly and cost-effectively while using data to support conclusions and drive accountability.

JB: Do you think you can hold lawyers (and the firms they work at) to a higher standard than firms can internally? Is there an advantage to pruning your talent through the cancelling of a contract versus the termination of a partner or office (as a firm would have to)?

BR: We think about it less in terms of higher standards and more about flexible and tailored solutions.

Our approach allows in-house departments to work with teams of lawyers calibrated to their precise needs that can ratchet up or down and change form on very short lead times. In-house lawyers can get the expertise they want at the scale they need without paying for anything they don’t. We use data from past engagements to refine our vetting process, which enables legal departments to make their hiring decisions through us with confidence.

JB: How do you feel about the future of legal tech community?

BR: Very bullish. While the exact market size for legal services and legal technology is often disputed, there is no doubt it’s in the hundreds of billions. Coupled with the fact that there is widespread dissatisfaction from buyers and sellers and myriad inefficiencies, I have no doubt that change will be seismic.

JB: Do you think we’ll see a legal Jeff Bezos soon?

BR: Absolutely. Watch this space.

JB: We certainly are!  Thanks Basha!


Joe Borstein

Joe Borstein is a frequent speaker on global trends in the legal industry and, specifically, how law firms are leveraging those trends to become more profitable. If you are interested in entrepreneurship and the delivery of legal services, please reach out to Joe directly atjoe.borstein@tr.com.

CRM Banner