Superpanel, a startup using AI to speed up plaintiff firms’ client onboarding processes, has raised $5.3 million in seed funding in its push to eliminate one of the legal industry’s most stubborn bottlenecks: intake and qualification.
The New York-based company says its software is aimed at “commercial litigants”—often law firms or in-house counsel—that take on (or sometimes seek) class-action suits, litigation-funding interest, or corporate clients needing short-term services that could become permanent.
The round was co-led by Outlander VC and Field Ventures, and included LOI Venture, Zenda Capital, 8-Bit Capital, and Behind Genius Ventures. Superpanel was co-founded by CEO Julien Emery (who previously founded underwriting platform Allay and had stints at Hootsuite) along with AI specialist Dingyu Zhang, with the goal of bringing modern automation to the top of the legal funnel.
An AI teammate for plaintiff firms to streamline intake
Legal intake is deceptively complex. A single question can involve collecting narrative, gathering documents, checking jurisdiction, and rapid-fire triaging—usually over phone, text, email, and web forms. Superpanel’s product is pitched as a digital teammate that does about half of it for you, walking prospects through guided questions to sum up their story and pull out important details and files.
Behind the scenes, it categorizes the type of matter (like “motor vehicle accident” or “premises liability”) and infers jurisdiction, as well as identifies missing documentation like police reports or medical records.
If the system picks up on something ambiguous or risky—there’s contradiction in witnesses’ timelines, uncertainty about responsibility for a crime, or statute-of-limitations issues—it escalates the issue to a human team member with a brief description rather than leaving raw transcripts.
From the company: The vendor is positioning the result as a unified, multisource, multichannel workflow that maintains an auditable path for compliance and fosters faster responsiveness. The vision isn’t just speed, but consistency: every prospect gets the same high-quality, policy-aligned intake experience—and firms already juggling high lead volumes no longer have to wonder whether they could be saving more cases with potential clients in their call-now queue.
Why intake automation is needed now for legal practices
The deciding factor in whether a client will hire someone is increasingly responsiveness. Quick response and transparent communication are among the highest of legal consumers’ purchasing considerations, yet firms still struggle to keep pace as inquiries spill across phone calls, emails, messaging apps, and web forms. Studies on lead management reveal that responding within minutes improves conversion, and that responding within mere minutes—not hours or days—can make all the difference, but the wait-and-see approach still taken by many companies underperforms.
On the operations front, the legal industry is still fighting low utilization rates—averaging around 30 percent for small firms, per several editions of the Clio Report—which implies that overhead continues to be a drag on efficiency. Intake automation hits that overhead directly, allowing attorneys and case managers more time for the legal work that keeps money flowing in.
Competitive landscape and differentiation among legal intake tools
Superpanel enters an active market. Tools like Clio Grow and MyCase provide intake forms, e-signatures, and CRM features; among newer entrants are Whippy.ai and LegalClerk.ai, which apply generative models to messaging and data collection. Superpanel’s pitch is depth in triage and escalation: not just gathering data, but judging fit, organizing facts, and directing edge cases to humans along with context and next steps.
For instance, in a personal injury case, the system asks for treatment information and provider names, and looks for possible venue issues or statute of limitations timelines based on local jurisdictional rules. That is the kind of guided decisioning, if accurate, that can drastically shrink the time between first conversation and retainer while minimizing risk from overlooked conflicts or incomplete files.
Security, compliance, and trust in AI-powered legal intake
Any AI system handling sensitive legal narratives and medical information needs to tackle data stewardship up front. Consider how plaintiff firms will measure solutions against standards like SOC 2, encryption policies, access permissions, and data-retention rules. For issues around protected health information, as well as for European services—triggering a whole new level of complexity under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)—HIPAA-like processes and business associate agreements could be table stakes, while text outreach would need to adhere to consent requirements as well as call- and messaging-related regulation, such as the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.
All of this goes to credibility and auditability. The American Bar Association has called for restrained use of generative AI, noting the importance of human guidance and documentation. Superpanel’s human-in-the-loop escalation and system logs were designed to adhere to that guidance, providing firms with an audit trail of the rationale behind decisions and when people got involved.
How Superpanel plans to use its new seed funding
Superpanel expects to hire across engineering and go-to-market, initially focusing on plaintiff-side practices. Look for tighter integrations with practice management systems, e-signature services, and telephony to allow for clean data flow from the intake file into the case file. The company also hints at ongoing work on model evaluation—think precision and recall on matter classification and document detection—along with conversion metrics (and time-to-response) that firms can monitor.
If Superpanel can consistently cut your intake workload in half while increasing conversion, the math is simple: more signed retainers, fewer dropped leads, and happier clients. In a marketplace where, as Thomson Reuters and the ABA have both observed, competitive advantage is increasingly about operational excellence, that could make all the difference.
The next stage will determine whether the product’s “digital teammate” can maintain accuracy and compliance at scale—across various case types, jurisdictions, and communication channels—without deluging staff with false positives or rote escalations. What law firms don’t need is another inbox; what they do need is fewer, smarter inboxes. Superpanel is wagering $5.3 million that AI can provide exactly such a thing.
