Hearst Corporation
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Priori raises $6.3M to help large companies hire outside legal help
Priori Legal, a startup rethinking the way that large corporations hire outside counsel, has raised $6.3 million in Series A funding.
Founded by CEO Basha Rubin and CPO Mirra Levitt (who met while classmates at Yale Law School), Priori launched as a legal marketplace for small and medium businesses before finding its current model in 2016.
Rubin explained that although Fortune 500 companies have their own in-house legal teams, they still spend an average of $150 million a year on outside legal counsel. And finding that counsel can be an arduous process — a consumer goods company, for example, might need to hire lawyers in all 50 states.
So by creating a marketplace of vetted lawyers (it says it only accepts 10% of applicants), by running a bidding process for the work and by streamlining the billing and on-boarding process, the startup can save companies an average of 60% of the money they spend on outside counsel and reduce the search time by 80%.
“We don’t get involved in the substance of the lawyer-client relationship,” Levitt added. “We are not a law firm, we don’t do any of the legal work. Our innovation is focused entirely on the process of rapidly identifying the right talent and, once the matter is up and running, making billing seamless.”
There are currently more than 1,500 lawyers in the marketplace, representing all 50 states in the U.S., as well as 47 countries and 700 practice proficiencies. Levitt said that while the first lawyers to join the platform were usually independent or worked at small firms that might not previously had access to these kinds of clients, there are now larger firms signing up as well.
Priori founders Mirra Levitt and Basha Rubin
And Rubin said interest in Priori has only grown during the pandemic and the resulting economic downturn. Companies are trying to do “more with less,” and “part of our value proposition is fundamentally cost savings.” For example, she noted that client spending on the platform has increased 200% in the last year.
“We began to see so much inbound demand that we would log onto Slack at 11pm and the entire team would be working,” she said. “We have a truly extraordinary team, but a) that’s not sustainable from a human perspective, and b) we saw an opportunity to really grow dramatically if we could throw resources at it.”
The Series A comes from Hearst Corporation (also a Priori customer), Great Oaks Venture Capital, Jambhala, Tim Steinert (former general counsel of Alibaba Group), Mindset Ventures, Bridge Venture Fund and Orrick’s Legal Technology Fund.
In addition to growing the team, Rubin said that the new funding will allow Priori to expand its network of lawyers, especially internationally.
“From a product perspective, we’re really building out our use of data throughout the platform,” Levitt said, adding that the company plans to use machine learning to improve attorney vetting, matchmaking, bidding, project scoping and more.
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Cosmo and Google create a mobile Watch Party for the new season of ‘You’
The second season of the Penn Badgley romantic murder drama “You” launches on Netflix today — and along with it, a new project called Cosmopolitan Watch Party.
You can hit play on the Watch Party website at the same time as you hit play on each episode, kicking off an experience that runs alongside the show. Watch Party will show you content from Cosmo that’s tied to what you’re seeing on-screen, and it’s often drawn from interviews with the cast and crew.
Cosmopolitan editor-in-chief Jessica Pels said her publication created Watch Party with Google News Lab, a team that collaborates with newsrooms to create new experiences as part of the larger Google News Initiative. The idea was to respond to broader shifts in TV viewing, where “binge viewing is the thing, appointment viewing is not.”
She added, “As a viewer, if you don’t catch it in that moment, you feel like you’re left out of that conversation. That’s why we’re bringing the conversation to you.”
Pels was hesitant about revealing too many details about Watch Party content, as so much of it is tied to the twists and turns of the new season. But as an example, she said Watch Party could reveal that Badgley described “a certain song that he listens to when he’s trying to get into the headspace of this murderer, in order to get into this scene.”
Not everyone will embrace the idea of constantly looking at their phone while they watch Netflix, but Pels said Cosmopolitan’s traffic data suggests that plenty of viewers are doing it already. She also emphasized that it’s “all flat content” consisting of text and graphics, with no video or sound.
“You don’t want to be annoyingly distracted from the show,” she said, describing it as “true companion content” that you can check when you want and ignore otherwise.
Simon Rogers, data lead at Google News Lab, told me that Pels and her team were given access to exclusive Google Trends data for additional insight into which characters and cast members viewers were responding. The News Lab also built a custom content management system for Watch Party that could be used for similar experiences in the future.
Not that Pels has necessarily decided what the next Watch Party will be.
“I kind of want to leave ourselves open to the right partnership or the right next opportunity for how best to execute round two,” she said.
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KitSplit brings its peer-to-peer, creative equipment rentals to Washington, D.C.
KitSplit aims to help creative professionals rent the equipment they need, whether it’s basic video gear or something a little more high-tech, say a 360-degree camera or an Oculus Rift. The service launched last year in New York, and now it’s ready to expand, starting with its launch in Washington, D.C., followed by Philadelphia and Boston. Co-founder Kristina Budelis said KitSplit… Read More
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