For Julian Emery, the issues have always been personal.
He is the CEO and co-founder of SuperPanel, a platform that helps law firms seamlessly embed their new clients.
He listed emotional encounters with the law. As a Canadian, he worked hard to find access to legal help. He also recalls his mother in a car accident and how legal payments helped his family continue to float for years. He felt that it was a corporate process of assessing legal intake, a new client or demand – boring.
“For consumers, it’s a maze of forms, phones, dropped leads, and most people give up before they get help,” he told TechCrunch. “For businesses, it’s a costly, error-prone bottleneck.”
Before recent advances in artificial intelligence, he said the intake process is considered too complicated for automation. But that has changed. After working at Hootsuite, Emery founded the health insurance underwriting platform Alley (who came out on NOVO Benefits) before working with his friend Dingyu Zhang, who had an AI background, to launch SuperPanel in 2024.
SuperPanel automates half of legal intake and manages collections and feedback, Emery said. We provide plaintiffs’ law firms with “digital teammates” that can help with escalation and compliance. “It attracts clients across calls, text messages, emails and forums, guides them through stories and shares the documents,” he continued. For businesses, it helps you sort case types, jurisdiction, and documents.
“If there is a risk of ambiguity, the system escalates to human team members,” he said. “The result was a unified multi-channel workflow that provided measurable results and provided a system that was trustworthy as real employees.”
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On Tuesday, the company announced a $5.3 million salary increase in a round co-led by Outlander VC and Field Ventures. Emery says he met several investors in this round through his last startup, and those early investors introduced him to what led the round for this new one. Others of this round include Loi Venture (co-founded by Hootsuite founder), Zenda Capital, 8-bit Capital, and behind Genius Ventures.
“We will use the funds to accelerate the employment of plaintiffs’ law firms and expand the capabilities of the Superpanel,” he said.
Legal is one of the top industries seeing change as artificial intelligence continues to innovate. So, the Superpanel is certainly not alone in this area, and its competitors include Clio Grow, LegalClerk.ai, Mycase, and Whippy.ai.
But Emery wants the Super Panel to stand out from the pack. “Consumers expect answers and solutions to be instantly self-service, shaped by AI tools and the online experiences they use every day,” Emery said. “The Superpanel will continue to guide them through that journey.”
