Case Study: Interview with Yayoi Shionoiri, Senior Counsel at Artsy
Yayoi Shionoiri is the Senior Counsel (and sole in-house lawyer) at Artsy, a global platform for discovering and collecting art, that most recently raised $50M in financing. Yayoi needed additional day-to-day support for her legal department for a range of corporate and commercial tasks.
I’ve been at Artsy since November 2015, and when I first started I was the sole in-house counsel. In the first 12 months, it was very clear to me that I was going to need additional support, but it can be challenging to get buy-in to spend more on legal when there are pressing business opportunities.
In my second year at Artsy, more resources were allocated to the legal department. I knew I didn’t have enough money for permanent help, so I began to investigate temp solutions.
The first step in my process was to reach out to other GCs in my network, to find out what services members were using. Priori Legal clearly rose to the top in terms of the number of recommendations. The buy-in from the tech community was very important in my decision-making process because I wanted to work with a company that understood and worked well with tech companies.
Like any good due diligencer would do, I talked to Priori and several competitors. I had in mind a very particular type of skill-set, class years of experience and culture fit for an attorney whom I thought would be the ideal second person in a small generalist team. Priori’s rigorous vetting process and data-driven technology platform made me confident that Priori had segmented the market to deliver the right person and right fit from a skills and culture standpoint.
I didn't have any concerns because I had done so much due diligence ahead of time. But that said, until I saw the quality of attorneys, their backgrounds and pricing based on my project request, I didn’t know for sure! Both of the attorneys I interviewed made me feel confident in Priori’s vetting process – not only were they a match on paper, they were lovely in person. I would say the only other concern I had was that your rates may be too reasonable…
Not at all. Artsy was very excited by Priori’s data-driven approach, since it is synergistic with what Artsy is trying to do.
Priori has made everything easy – I love the data-driven approach to matchmaking, the seamless billing platform, and Priori’s hands-on approach to partnering with clients. I feel very lucky to have found my attorney through Priori and am honored to work with them.
I hope to turn to Priori if a specialist need comes up. I also try to be the best possible advocate for Priori and recommend it whenever anyone is looking for temporary legal help or specialists.
We’ve been able to save up to 50% for a similar type of temp attorney.