Priori, an outside counsel selection and management company, announced Tuesday the release of Priori RFP, a new product designed to streamline the Request for Proposal (RFP) process for corporate legal departments.

Founded in 2013 by Basha Rubin and Mirra Levitt, who respectively serve as the company’s CEO and Chief Product Officer, Priori started with an outside counsel marketplace, before launching Priori Panel Management (previously known as Scout) in 2022. The new RFP product is intended to fill the gap between identifying external counsel and managing the relationship between legal departments and their law firms.

The release follows a successful trial period as part of Priori’s Feature Lab, which incorporated an earlier version of the RFP Software, as well as review and scorecard features, in a free six month early access program.

What It Is: Priori RFP is a software solution for creating RFPs, evaluating bids, tracking performance, and communicating with outside counsel. The software will come with both ready-made and customizable templates for RFPs, tools for comparing bids and measuring the performance of successful bidders, and collaboration functions.

Rubin told Legaltech News that the software will satisfy customer demands to “be able to compare [firms] side by side on one platform, and then also creat[e] feedback loops with their panel.”

Legal departments can select firms they have previously worked with to receive an outgoing RFP, as well as identify firms they have not worked with that they would like to query.

“If they just want to use their existing network, they can pull from all that panel management data … about the suppliers they’re already working with,” Levitt said. “If they want to reach out to other firms that they’ve never worked with, they can add those in as well … Finally, to the extent they say ‘I don’t know the name of the firm that I want, but I want a certain kind of new relationship,’ they can also reach out to Priori’s marketplace and we can search from there.”

Why It’s Needed: Rubin told Legaltech News that the new software “completes the full life cycle of finding the right lawyer at the right price.” While identifying, hiring, and managing outside counsel have largely been separate processes, Priori hopes to bring them all under one roof.

Integrating the RFP process with the management of outside counsel relationships will also serve to make both processes more efficient, Levitt told Legaltech News. “There’s a lot of data feedback loops that people can leverage here. And to the extent they’re building that sort of data about their existing set of suppliers in panel management, or pulling in way more data there to inform the RFP process and make it more efficient.”

While corporate legal departments have been slow to adopt new RFP tools, and have at times been reluctant to engage in a RFP process at all, the competitive bidding represents a potential cost savings for legal work.

The Competition: A variety of other legal tech companies serve various aspects of the outside counsel selection and management process. Leopard Solutions recently unveiled Leopard Prowess, a platform for corporations looking to engage law firms, while outside counsel management platform Persuit offers RFP creation and evaluation tools as well. Recent years have also seen a profusion of RFP response platforms, including Loopio, Responsive, and ikaun.

Priori’s leadership believes that the comprehensiveness of its offerings and the strength of its talent marketplace set the company apart.

“Linking all three of them, the panel management, the talent marketplace, and the RFP, we’re really a single source for all outside counsel hiring,” said Rubin.She called Priori “ a single source solution for them to make sure they’re hiring the right lawyer and then understanding the performance of that lawyer over time so they can make better decisions.”