For Julien Emery, the problem has always been personal. 

He’s the CEO and co-founder of Superpanel, a platform that helps law firms seamlessly onboard new clients. 

He listed emotional encounters with the law: As a Canadian, he found access to legal help hard and expensive; he also recalls his mother in a car accident, and how the legal payout helped keep his family afloat for years. He found the legal intake — the process of a firm evaluating a new client or request — tedious. 

“For consumers, it’s a maze of forms, phone calls, and dropped leads that cause most people to give up before getting help,” he told TechCrunch. “For firms, it’s a costly, error-prone bottleneck.” 

Before the recent advancements in artificial intelligence, he said that the intake process was regarded as too complex for automation. But that’s changed. Emery worked at Hootsuite, then founded the health insurance underwriting platform Allay (which exited to Novo Benefits), before teaming up with his friend Dingyu Zhang, who had a background in AI, to launch Superpanel in 2024. 

Superpanel automates half the work of legal intake, Emery said, managing collection and feedback. It provides plaintiff law firms with a “digital teammate” that helps with escalation and compliance. “It engages clients across phone, texting, email, and forums, guiding them through their story and sharing documents,” he continued. For firms, it helps sort case type, jurisdiction, and documentation.

“When there’s risk of ambiguity, the system escalates to a human team member,” he said. “The result is a unified, multi-channel workflow that delivers measurable results and gives firms a system they can trust like a real employee.” 

The company announced Tuesday a seed $5.3 million raise in a round co-led by Outlander VC and Field Ventures. Emery said he met some investors in this round through his last startup, and those early investors introduced him to the ones who led the round for this new one. Others in this round include LOI Venture (co-founded by the founder of Hootsuite), Zenda Capital, 8-Bit Capital, and Behind Genius Ventures. 

“We’ll use the funding to accelerate hiring and expand Superpanel’s capabilities for plaintiff law firms,” he said. 

Legal is one of the top industries seeing transformation as artificial intelligence continues to innovate. So Superpanel certainly isn’t alone in this space, and its competitors include Clio Grow, LegalClerk.ai, MyCase, and Whippy.ai. 

But Emery is hoping Superpanel will stand out from the pack. “Consumers now expect answers and solutions to be instant and self-serve, shaped by AI tools and the online experiences they use every day,” Emery said.  “Superpanel guides them continuously across that journey.”