Supio, the latest artificial intelligence (AI) platform specializing in personal injury cases, has joined the growing AI legal tech space on Tuesday, August 27.
The rapid rise of AI in the workforce has recently reached law firms seeking to streamline rigorous and time-consuming tasks when dealing with cases. Supio co-founders Jerry Zhou and Kyla Lam saw this as an opening to leverage generative AI in understanding complex data and identifying critical connections within certain data.
“We pursued the legal industry because we knew it wasn’t just document-heavy—it was also due for technology innovation,” Chief Executive Zhou said. “[These are] practice areas that require compiling thousands of documents from multiple sources and analyzing and finding information from the data within them.”
After attending various conferences and meetings with hundreds of lawyers across the United States, Zhou and Lam decided to focus on personal injury and mass tort plaintiff law, which involves civil cases filed on behalf of victims of negligence. These cases often involve large volumes of paperwork and documents, including police reports, medical records, financial statements, insurance claims, and consumer complaints.
Supio aims to assist by generating demand legal letters and supporting documentation and offering an interface similar to a chatbot that allows users to search and review the evidence.
Bringing AI to legal battles
While the service that Supio aims to provide seems no different than that of other startups, Zhou highlighted that their technology is more complex in its technical approach.
“Law is extremely complex and nuanced, and most creators of work productivity tools lack a true understanding of the legal documents lawyers ultimately have to produce, which inhibits the development of accurate [AI] models,” Zhou said. “Supio has hundreds of models running at a given time with different functions to try to understand and classify documents. We then measure this against the work products that are expected and improve these results gradually.”
He also claimed that Supio was built with flexible software combined with AI capable of organizing unstructured data and producing accurate results better than human levels without hallucination. However, the CEO did not disclose any performance or test results to support his claim.
Presently, Supio collaborates with around 30 personal injury and mass tort law firms and hopes to secure 100 firms before the end of the year. Zhuo added that their yearly recurring revenue has surpassed $1 million, primarily from subscription fees that vary with case volume.
In terms of funding, the startup has scored a total of $33 million courtesy of major investors Sapphire Ventures, Bonfire Ventures, and Foothill Ventures. It also expects to double its headcount next year to reach 54 employees who will work on expanding Supio to more customer base and other law specialties.
Lawyers remain reluctant
The early success of the startup can be attributed to the increasing interest in the use of AI in the legal landscape. American Bar Association found that 35% of law firms already apply AI tools in their operations based on a 2023 poll. LexisNexis also noted that 43% of firms now allocate a budget for generative AI.
Other surveys also point to a promising future. LexisNexis recorded 90% of legal executives predict an increase in AI investment over the next five years. Moreover, Gartner forecasted that the value of the legal tech market would almost double its 2022 worth, reaching $50 billion by 2027, thanks to generative AI.
Despite these data, Supio still finds itself in precarious territory since lawyers and law firms remain reluctant to give AI tools access to legal documents, with others already prohibiting it.
In 2023, the State Bar of California instructed legal experts to refrain from adding client information to AI tools that “lack reasonable or adequate security.” In the same year, a Texas district judge ordered to ban on the use of generative AI in writing court filings without human fact-checking. This came after a group of lawyers relied on ChatGPT to write a complaint, which included perjurious claims.
Zhuo stressed that Supio follows security protocols that comply with privacy regulations. However, the future of the startup remains unclear considering the growing safety concerns associated with the expanding growth of AI in the workforce.
