Californian-founded legal AI startup Superpanel today (23 September) emerged from stealth mode and announced that it has raised a total of $5.3m in funding, including from Outlander, an investor in major companies such as Gusto, Stripe and Scale AI.
Superpanel, which combines generative AI technology and rules-based logic, has been in an 18-month private beta period working with law firms to refine its platform, which helps to triage and onboard potential litigants. It is consumer focused and in simplest terms, helps consumer to work out if they have a legal problem that they can get help for. For law firms, it can take the details of a consumers claim and begin to collect supporting evidence.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider, Julien Emery, CEO and co-founder of Superpanel, said: “What we’ve done is we’ve trained this autonomous digital team mate to take care of some or all parts of that workflow. It can handle large parts of that workflow where it can listen to someone’s story and it can follow up if it needs to. It can understand if maybe someone doesn’t have a case now, but they might have a case later, and it’ll autonomously follow up with them later. It can understand what evidence it needs to collect and can reach out to people to get that evidence.
“It can then categorize that evidence; recognize if it’s collecting the right evidence; rename it; and put it in the right place, and this cuts out a ton of work in the intake process.” Emery says that Superpanel eliminates 80% of the work from some intake processes and observes: “We’re just going to keep going deeper and digging into that.”
It is envisaged that the new offering will be attractive to plaintiff law firms with high-volume consumer-facing legal practices, such as personal injury, employment law and lemon law. It would also appear to lend itself to mass tort and class action cases, where building the case can be a painstaking process. Emery says: “As long as it is consumer facing, we can do it.”
In terms of accuracy, Emery said that there is a human review at critical junctures and that the company deliberately err on the side of caution with false positive methodology – identifying cases as valid rather than missing viable legal opportunities.
In a bullish statement, Eamon Graziano, fractional COO at companies including The Consumer Protection Law Group, said: “The return on investment was immediate. Within months it paid for itself. What sets Superpanel apart is that it is not just software, it’s a teammate that never forgets, never needs retraining, and keeps our team focused on signing more cases. With Superpanel, we are no longer intake constrained. If law firms aren’t thinking about this, they will be left in the dust.”
The funders in full if you’re interested were Outlander VC (backers of Scale AI, Stripe, and Gusto) and Field Ventures (investors in Wrapbook, Bikky, and Suppli). Other participating investors include LOI Venture (co-founded by Hootsuite founder Ryan Holmes), Zenda Capital, 8-Bit Capital, and Behind Genius Ventures. The funding will accelerate hiring and expand the product’s capabilities.
“AI is redefining what software can be, and the most important breakthroughs come from founders who see that shift early. Intake is one of the biggest unsolved bottlenecks in law, and Superpanel has built a system that not only scales but restores trust and consistency at a moment when the market needs it most,” said Jordan Kretchmer, senior partner of Outlander VC.