Priori Legal, a marketplace for in-house legal teams to find and hire outside counsel, is expanding to also serve as a marketplace for legal technology and alternative legal services providers.

The expansion means that inhouse legal teams will be able to use Priori not only to hire lawyers to help with projects, but also to find and access “new law” and legal technology options suitable to the project.

While Priori plans to gradually expand the providers it offers through its marketplace, it is launching today with three:

  • LawGeex, which offers an AI-powered contract review automation solution.

  • Factor, the alternative legal services provider that describes itself as delivering complex legal work at scale.

  • QuisLex a ALSP that specializes in managed document review, contract management, compliance services, legal spend management, and legal operations consulting.

“One of the things that we started to see over the past couple of years was that sometimes the best-fit solution was not an individual lawyer or a law firm or a group of lawyers, but instead it was an ALSP or a law company or a legal tech company,” cofounder and CEO Basha Rubin told me during an interview yesterday.

“We want to offer a place that you can compare the full range of solutions in the traditional and new legal ecosystems to decide what the right fit is for your project.”

Rubin said that the new offering will work as an extension of Priori’s existing marketplace.

The way Priori works is that an inhouse legal team comes to the site and submits an RFP. Priori’s technology then identifies the attorneys in its network who best match the job and generates a shortlist, which a Priori project manager reviews and then provides to the inhouse team.

The team then can review the suggestions, message or speak with the recommended attorneys, or ask them to submit bids.

With the addition of legal tech and ALSPs, nothing about that process will change, except that the short list of matches provided by Priori will, when appropriate, include tech providers or ALSPs.

The result, Rubin said, will be to offer a range of different solutions for a matter, based on its scale and subject matter — maybe lawyers from a mid-sized law firm, a technology platform, and an ALSP.

“We’ve always wanted to be a highly curated, embedded list of best-in-class legal providers,” Rubin said. “We’re just responding to the market and broadening our definition of what kinds of providers are in the marketplace.”

An example would be an RFP for a high-volume review of non-disclosure agreements. Depending on the quantity and timing of the review project, Priori could recommend attorneys who could staff it, but they could also suggest an ALSP that could could efficiently handle a high volume review.

“There’s always a tipping point for organizations between where the volume and scale is such that it makes sense to use individual lawyers or a small boutique law firm and where it makes sense to bring in a technology,” Rubin said.

Priori’s fee for this will be the same as it is for lawyers hired through the site, which is that it charges the client a “composite fee” that is made up of the provider’s fee for the services and Priori’s management fee, which is calculated as a percentage of the provider’s fee.

Rubin said Priori will be adding additional companies to the marketplace. “We are going to be actively vetting and onboarding additional companies to join the Priori marketplace.”

Last October, Priori raised $6.3 million in a Series A financing. which Rubin and cofounder Mirra Levitt discussed with me in an exclusive LawNext interview.

Photo of Bob Ambrogi Bob Ambrogi

Bob is a lawyer, veteran legal journalist, and award-winning blogger and podcaster. In 2011, he was named to the inaugural Fastcase 50, honoring “the law’s smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries and leaders.” Earlier in his career, he was editor-in-chief of several legal publications, including The National Law Journal, and editorial director of ALM’s Litigation Services Division.