Link: https://youtu.be/kZ8Dvqns618?si=o2aRa7cZOHrbNklT
From pandemic startup to AI casework infrastructure
Supio didn’t start because of hype. It started because Jerry Zhou and his co-founder—former Avalara and Microsoft teammates—wanted to build something meaningful. During COVID, they explored the legal landscape and found something that hit home: plaintiff lawyers fighting for individuals, outgunned by defense firms, buried in documents, and still relying on human bandwidth to push cases forward.
That’s where they saw the opportunity.
Jerry: “We didn't really know that legal [was] so nuanced. And one day we stumbled upon personal injury and plaintiff law. It's always the David versus Goliath story where technology can really make a difference, and that's how we found our home.”
Today, Supio has 130+ employees, 200+ partner firms, and a roadmap that’s moving fast—from AI timelines and demand packs to full-blown case agents.
Why AI isn’t a tool—it’s a teammate
Most people still think about AI the way they think about ChatGPT: you give it a prompt, it gives you an output. But that’s not how law works. A case isn’t a prompt. It’s a messy, evolving stack of records, charts, notes, transcripts, and billing codes.
Supio’s vision is agentic AI: an AI system that follows the same workflow as a case manager or paralegal—reading documents, identifying gaps, suggesting next steps, and assembling everything into a strategic, litigation-ready package.
Jerry: “We want the AI to follow the journey of a piece of data inside a law firm. From intake to demand to trial, with decisions made at every step.”
It’s not a feature set, it’s firm-wide infrastructure.
From cruise control to self-driving legal ops
Jerry used a clear analogy: legal AI today is like early self-driving tech. Helpful, but still needs your hands on the wheel. Supio is aiming for something closer to a legal autopilot—handling entire segments of work autonomously so attorneys can focus on strategy.
Jerry: “Most tools today are assisted workflows. We’re shifting those into autonomous workflows. Not just helping you go faster, but offloading the entire category of work.”
In real terms, that means:
- AI that routes records to the right case
- Flags over-treatment or missed injuries
- Suggests when a case is ready to settle based on policy thresholds
- Runs deposition prep by surfacing contradictions in real-time
It’s not about making lawyers replaceable. It’s about giving them leverage.
Why law firms can’t scale with people alone
Paralegals are burnt out. Attorneys are underwater. And as firms grow, the limiting factor isn’t marketing or intake, it’s capacity.
Marc: “We work with a ton of personal injury firms across the nation, and their biggest challenge as they scale, is scaling the paralegals and the people that are doing [the] work.”
Supio is building the AI version of a full case team: one that reads every record, remembers everything, flags what matters, and gets better as you run more cases through it.
The next era: agents, not prompts
Here’s where Supio is headed:
- Structured agents: Not a chatbot, but a decision framework that understands timelines, rules, policy limits, and litigation strategy
- Case awareness: AI that doesn’t just respond, but monitors the case for when something changes (new bills, new treatment, new risks)
- Strategic recommendations: From medical gaps to case viability, Supio wants to be the first line of insight before a lawyer makes a move
Jerry: “If you're over-treating a client and it's going above their policy line, then there needs to be an insight...to say, hey, like this is probably a case ready to settle. If you understand that there's missing bills or missing records, then the team needs to be able to order that.”
“...we're surfacing insights that can help you make the difference between winning and losing a case.”
That’s the bar.
Final thought: AI that earns your trust
Supio isn’t just building flashy features. They’re chasing trust. The trust that comes when a paralegal opens the AI dashboard and knows: this is right. This saves me 6 hours. This lets me sleep tonight.
And that’s why the product is evolving from assistant…to agent…to teammate.
Want to see what agentic AI looks like in practice?
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