In-house legal teams spend tens, sometimes hundreds, of millions annually on outside counsel. And yet, far too often, the selection process is still driven by gut instinct, legacy relationships, or a colleague’s quick recommendation. In the latest episode of “Notes to My (Legal) Self,” I sat down with Basha Rubin, CEO and co-founder of Priori, to explore what happens when legal departments replace instinct with data and how marketplaces are redefining outside counsel management for modern teams.
Look At Your Spend. Then Ask Better Questions.
“The average Fortune 500 company spends between $100 to $150 million a year on outside counsel,” Rubin told me. “But much of that is still being allocated without a structured framework for risk or complexity.” If that sounds familiar, it’s because many legal departments still lack the muscle memory or the mandate to challenge their own assumptions about who they work with and why.
Rubin’s team often runs a simple but revealing exercise with new clients: they ask legal departments to map their outside counsel engagements on a basic risk-complexity matrix. “We literally create a 3×3: high, medium, and low risk versus high, medium, and low complexity,” she explained. Then they categorize all legal projects from the past year, flag who handled them, and compare that against spend.
The results almost always tell a story. A large portion of work that ends up at Biglaw could, and arguably should, be handled by more targeted providers. “That doesn’t mean high-risk work should leave,” Rubin clarified. “Big firms are best at that. But there is an overwhelming amount of medium-risk, medium-complexity work that can be done faster and more cost-effectively by others.”
Gut Feelings Are Not Defensible Decisions
Imagine a litigation matter lands on your desk. It’s medium-risk, in a familiar jurisdiction, with a limited budget. Your next move should be grounded in data: who has handled this issue before? What were the outcomes? Who performed best on metrics that matter: speed, clarity, predictability, client satisfaction?
Instead, many in-house teams default to the familiar. “It’s often based on who you went to law school with,” Rubin noted. Or maybe someone sends an email around the department asking for referrals. In the absence of a structured system, it’s no surprise that legal teams lean on intuition. But that’s not a strategy. And in today’s environment, it’s not defensible.
“Legal is no longer immune from a procurement-style mindset,” Rubin said. She’s not wrong. Whether or not you like that trend, it’s here. Boards expect defensible spend. CFOs want transparency. CEOs want business-aligned legal departments. That starts with showing your outside counsel decisions aren’t just reasonable; they’re repeatable.
Design for Repeatability, Not Just Reputation
Rubin and her team at Priori are pushing the industry toward repeatable, data-driven outside counsel selection. They pull from both public and private sources to create a searchable database of lawyer experience across firms and jurisdictions. That includes litigation history, expertise tags, diversity initiatives, and internal reviews from past engagements. “You can search across thousands of attorneys to identify the 12 who are best suited for that particular matter,” she explained.
That may sound like a luxury reserved for massive legal departments, but Rubin argues it’s becoming a necessity. “In-house teams are under enormous pressure to do more with less,” she said. “Vendor selection is one of the highest-leverage points in the department. If you do it well, everything downstream gets better.”
The best teams aren’t just collecting data. They’re building systems. They have frameworks for when to run RFPs. They create scorecards for reviewing vendors after each engagement. They loop in legal ops early. They tie spend to performance, not just outcomes. And perhaps most importantly, they treat outside counsel like part of the business, not a one-time transaction.
Don’t Just Save Money. Gain Leverage.
The legal department is often seen as a cost center. But that perception changes quickly when you show how strategic vendor selection can create cost predictability, improve turnaround time, and deliver higher satisfaction to internal clients.
This is not about cutting corners. It’s about making better, more deliberate choices. “Flexible resourcing is no longer just a stopgap,” Rubin emphasized. “More and more teams are using it as a long-term strategy.” The smartest in-house leaders are building core teams that stay close to the business and complementing them with external resources that flex based on workload, jurisdiction, or subject-matter expertise.
If that sounds familiar, it should. That’s how product teams scale. That’s how procurement works. That’s how operations functions across the business. Legal doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel. It just has to learn how to drive it.
What To Do Next
If you’re an in-house leader, take a hard look at how your team chooses outside counsel. Start tracking the data. Build a risk-complexity matrix for your past 12 months of matters. Review where you spent the most, and what you actually got for it. Then build the next cycle with intentionality.
Legacy relationships aren’t a reason to avoid change. They’re an opportunity to do better.
As Rubin put it, “We’re building the infrastructure for defensible legal decisions. The question is: will legal departments use it?”
Now is the time to stop outsourcing by instinct. Use the data. Design the system. And make vendor selection the strategic advantage it was always meant to be.
Olga V. Mack is the CEO of TermScout, an AI-powered contract certification platform that accelerates revenue and eliminates friction by certifying contracts as fair, balanced, and market-ready. A serial CEO and legal tech executive, she previously led a company through a successful acquisition by LexisNexis. Olga is also a Fellow at CodeX, The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, and the Generative AI Editor at law.MIT. She is a visionary executive reshaping how we law—how legal systems are built, experienced, and trusted. Olga teaches at Berkeley Law, lectures widely, and advises companies of all sizes, as well as boards and institutions. An award-winning general counsel turned builder, she also leads early-stage ventures including Virtual Gabby (Better Parenting Plan), Product Law Hub, ESI Flow, and Notes to My (Legal) Self, each rethinking the practice and business of law through technology, data, and human-centered design. She has authored The Rise of Product Lawyers, Legal Operations in the Age of AI and Data, Blockchain Value, and Get on Board, with Visual IQ for Lawyers (ABA) forthcoming. Olga is a 6x TEDx speaker and has been recognized as a Silicon Valley Woman of Influence and an ABA Woman in Legal Tech. Her work reimagines people’s relationship with law—making it more accessible, inclusive, data-driven, and aligned with how the world actually works. She is also the host of the Notes to My (Legal) Self podcast (streaming on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube), and her insights regularly appear in Forbes, Bloomberg Law, Newsweek, VentureBeat, ACC Docket, and Above the Law. She earned her B.A. and J.D. from UC Berkeley. Follow her on LinkedIn and X @olgavmack.
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