When defence counsel in an Ontario discovery suggests a client “hasn’t had much treatment,” Chris MacDonald types a question into Supio. Within seconds, he has a complete list of every treatment visit in the disputed time period and the associated OCF-18s.

“I can say, actually counsel, here’s how many visits there were and how many thousands of dollars were incurred,” he says. “You can see them all here. We can move on.”

On the other side of the table, people are wondering where that answer came from so quickly. For MacDonald Injury Lawyers, the answer is an AI built specifically for Ontario personal injury law.

A family firm that chose the plaintiff’s side

Founding partner David MacDonald says plaintiff work has “been a source of energy for me and for all of us… actually making a difference.”

That outlook is baked into MacDonald Injury Lawyers, a “new” firm that has been 35 years in the making through earlier iterations of David’s practice. Today he works alongside his sons Chris and Jon, several associates, four law clerks and an articling student.

Chris grew up watching his dad practice. Early on, he realized his reward “was not driven from bureaucracy or helping insurance companies, but more so from helping people.”

Jon tried on other practice areas in law school (cybersecurity and privacy) but none of them felt like his profession and his values were pulling in the same direction. 

What they believe makes their firm different is how relentlessly they work to “up their game” with better tools. That mindset is what led them to Supio.

When David saw the value of controlling the medium

David understood how technology could tilt a courtroom long before AI entered the picture.

He remembers a trial where, as plaintiff’s counsel, he had a choice: walk up the aisle with a bundle of paper clipped together and risk dropping it on the floor, or air-drop exhibits directly to jurors’ iPads so they could manipulate the documents themselves.

He chose the iPads. The senior defence lawyer on the other side (“a dean of the bar”) was impressed enough to settle the case after seven days.

“As McLuhan says, the medium is the message,” David says. “If you are controlling that medium, then you’re controlling the message and, ultimately, the result.”

That appetite for better tools eventually led to an open house at the firm, where an Ontario colleague, Adam Wagman of Howie Sacks & Henry, introduced him to Supio.

An “exponential improvement in our ability to manage cases undersells it,” David now says.

What happens when 20,000 pages become AI-searchable

Supio’s impact came when they began loading entire injury files into the platform.

“We’re uploading 20,000 pages of a case that we somewhat know,” David explains, “and we want to know it inside out.” Supio becomes the equivalent of uploading a full set of encyclopedias and then being able to interrogate them in real time.

That changes how they approach core litigation issues like causation and consistency. David gives an example of using Supio to surface every reference to dizziness in the first three months after an accident. “Seeing 45 entries with respect to dizziness in those first months nails the door on causation,” he says.

Another powerful pattern Supio exposes is consistency over time. “Headaches appearing several thousand times over four years is an immense amount of power when you can harness that result,” David notes. 

Those patterns live in clinical notes, records, and SABS documentation that would be almost impossible to trace manually at scale.

How the MacDonalds use Supio to stay 3 moves ahead in every examination

For Chris, David and Jon, Supio is now part of the daily fabric of case prep and live examinations.

If there’s a pre-accident back issue buried across 2,000 pages and the examination starts tomorrow, Chris can’t afford to manually trace every reference. Instead, he asks Supio to identify pre-existing health issues in the medical records or to surface every mention of a specific problem.

That changes client prep too. Chris can test their recollection against the actual medical record as they speak. “I can show them, well, no, this is a clearer picture of your medical history and what happened after the accident. It wasn’t two months after, it was two years after.” 

When defence lawyers probe gaps in treatment or attack the volume of care, Chris queries Supio for a time-bounded list of visits and related forms, then responds with specifics.

For surprise lines of questioning that neither side anticipated, Supio again acts as the fast-thinking strategist. “No one has the time in that circumstance to pore through an entire file,” Chris says. “That’s where Supio can bring information directly to the forefront and allow you to address it head on.”

Avoiding hallucinations

Jon’s first instinct with Supio was skepticism. “I wanted to make sure that I could trust it,” he says. Early on, he double- and triple-checked every citation the system produced on a sample case he knew well.

What he found is that the citations held up. 

Over time, he still reviews and verifies before sending anything out, but he’s reached the point where he can confidently rely on the answers in the heat of a discovery. If defence counsel questions whether a fact is accurate, he already knows he can point to the underlying document and let them dig through their own records to catch up.

Chris, who spent years hearing about AI hallucinations, highlights another reason they trust Supio. It only works on the documents they themselves have loaded into a file. It does not invent answers or pull from unknown sources.

“You know exactly and have complete control over whatever documents it’s going to rely on,” he says. That design significantly reduces the risk that the tool will supply fact-free “insights.”

Making sense of SABS and transfer files

In Ontario, no serious personal injury practice can ignore SABS, and that is another area where the firm sees Supio as differentiated from generic AI tools.

At a recent conference, David heard other providers tout their ability to “work with the Ontario system” and bring SABS into a case. To him, much of that sounded like “a distinction without a difference.”

By contrast, they’ve pushed Supio to ingest the full SABS file, including clinical entries and handwritten notes that can’t be captured by simple OCR. “There is so much gold in them, they’re hills, when you look into a SABS file,” David says. 

Bringing that entire dataset into Supio gives them a richer picture of consistency of injury and fills in the gaps between clinical notes, especially for the many modestly injured clients whose $65,000 in available benefits must be used wisely for recovery.

The same capability is invaluable for transfer files the firm inherits from other law offices. Those cases may arrive as 10,000-page PDFs, as scattered folders, or in “various states of repair or disrepair.” There may be a mediation around the corner, but little clarity on what has happened on the accident benefits side or how far the file has progressed.

“Supio is like a good librarian,” Chris says. “It will keep it. It will call information for you. It’ll give it to you, but it’s also a good strategist.”

Other AI tools felt like “version 1.0”

In a market suddenly crowded with AI tools, the firm has demoed other platforms.

David notes that many offerings feel like version 1.0 products that force lawyers to click through endless boxes and settings just to get an answer. That interrupts the creative, iterative thinking he values in case analysis. By comparison, Supio lets him move directly from a question to authoritative answers he can click through to source documents.

Jon gives a more direct competitive example. The firm demoed another platform and revisited it eight months later. “The changes between eight months and now were what Supio has done in three weeks,” he says.

Knowing the case in granular detail

Ultimately, the MacDonalds see Supio as a way to raise the level of representation in a system where insurers “are paid every day to pay you less money.”

When mediators and defence counsel see that you “have your own case in granular detail, you know it inside out, and it’s apparent you have that information in hand every time you start a sentence,” settlement dynamics change.

Supio makes it possible to quickly identify the “frailties, flaws, and misstatements” in the other side’s materials and correct them with precise citations. The goal is not to embarrass anyone, but to reach a common factual understanding of what actually happened. 

That promotes dialogue and signals that the plaintiff’s side is ready for trial tomorrow.

Time savings matter, but for David they are almost a by-product. “I can’t do anything for a client unless I have time to do something for that client,” he says. Supio frees that time while strengthening the work itself.

For Jon, the last word of advice to peers is simple: don’t just glance at the platform. 

“You can only get out of it what you put in,” he says. Spend a few hours really poking around in Supio, load a real file, and see what it can do in the context of Ontario personal injury practice. 

In his experience, that is all it takes to be sold.