Why We Built Superpanel: A Digital Teammate for Legal Intake

Why we started, and why the time is now

For me (Julien), the problem of legal access has always been personal. When my mom was in a serious car accident, she couldn’t work for two years. A personal injury lawyer fought for her and kept our family afloat. To us, that lawyer was a hero. Years later, I watched a close friend burn through $40,000 and meet with over 20 attorneys just to learn if he had an employment case. He kept repeating his story and organizing documents until someone finally agreed to help. And as a Canadian navigating the U.S. visa process, I experienced firsthand how opaque and intimidating getting legal help can feel. Different situations, same reality: getting legal help is too complex, too costly, and often out of reach.

On the technology side, intake was historically considered  too complex for automation: long conversations, endless documents, firm-specific rules. I (Dingyu) spent years building conversational AI systems at scale, and until recently it wasn’t possible to tackle legal intake. That has changed. With today’s advances, AI can reliably handle these workflows when coupled with the right product architecture. Superpanel combines language models with a cognitive decision engine designed specifically for legal, producing consistent, auditable results firms can trust.

It was our shared experiences – seeing the pain consumers felt and the limits of current systems – that pushed us to start Superpanel.  Our investors share that conviction, backing us with the capital and expertise to scale because intake is one of the largest unsolved challenges in a tens-of-billions market, and the tools to fix it didn’t exist until now.

How Superpanel works for firms and consumers

Superpanel is a digital teammate for plaintiff law firms.

For law firms: It automates over half of intake work, reduces missed opportunities, and frees up staff to focus on higher-value client work and revenue-driving activities. Firms can coach it, audit it, and trust it like a real team member. The result is sustainable growth, with intake that’s consistent, auditable, and no longer constrained by hiring.

For consumers: It makes getting legal help as simple as telling your story, sharing documents, and receiving a clear answer without repeating yourself to different people.

Unlike generic bots, Superpanel is purpose-built for legal: coachable, auditable, and safe by design.

The problem with intake today

Nine out of 10 people who suffer harm that could become a legal case never contact a lawyer. For the consumers who do try, intake is confusing and discouraging. They get stuck repeating their story, re-submitting the same paperwork, or waiting for a call back. For firms, that frustration shows up as lost leads, wasted staff time, and marketing dollars that never convert. Fixing intake gives people a clear, guided way to engage, while giving firms steadier conversion, predictable ROI, and growth without adding headcount.

Proof it works

We’ve already seen what happens when firms put Superpanel to work. Today, it’s helping thousands of people every week, quietly doing the work intake staff used to chase down.

Firms report more than half of manual intake work offloaded, with conversion steady or improving, and far fewer leads lost. 

One early customer said it best: “I can finally grow without hiring more intake staff. We’re not dropping the ball on any lead.”

Where we’re headed

Our mission is to turn intake from a manual burden into a digital system that makes legal help accessible for people and scalable for firms.

Because getting legal help should not depend on who you know, how much money you have, or how many hours you can spend on the phone. It should be as simple as telling your story and knowing someone is listening.

We are now live: superpanel.io. Schedule a call here to see how Superpanel can scale your intake team.

Julien Emery & Dingyu Zhang, Co-Founders, Superpanel