To represent vulnerable clients, you need fluency in the data their injuries generate. Howie, Sacks & Henry needed comprehension of medical nuance so specific that only a system built for personal injury could recognize it.

Adam Wagman is a Senior Partner at Howie, Sacks & Henry. The Toronto firm recently celebrated its 25th anniversary and has grown far beyond what its founders first imagined.

“We started with five lawyers,” he says. “Early on, we thought the optimal size would be about 15 lawyers and maybe 50 staff. Big enough to do great work, small enough that you still know everyone’s name, their spouse, their kids.”

Today, the firm has well over 20 lawyers and more than 100 staff. With that growth has come a highly specialized, people-heavy practice.

A practice built on specialization

HSH’s practice stretches across major lanes of plaintiff injury law: catastrophic motor vehicle cases, accident benefits and disability claims, medical and birth-related negligence, mass tort and class actions, nursing home and institutional negligence, product liability, and complex brain, spinal, and fatal injury litigation.

That breadth creates a resourcing challenge.

“It becomes very people-heavy,” he explains. “You need clerks who specialize in medical negligence work, and clerks who specialize in nursing home negligence work. You can’t just plug a motor vehicle clerk into medical negligence.”

The Managing Partner who saw the shift coming

Wagman has always treated technology as part of the job. When he became managing partner in 2008, his first move was simple: “I took paper away from everybody.” If they wanted to be leaders in personal injury, that meant leading on the tech side too.

Fast forward to November 2022. His son, an engineering and applied math student at Queen’s University, called him.

“He said, ‘Dad, there’s this thing called ChatGPT, and they’re about to roll it out publicly. You should sign up for it.’ I signed up even before it came online and started using it the second I could. My mind was blown. I came into the office and started telling my partners they needed to start using this.”

That early exposure convinced Wagman and his partners that AI was going to matter. But it also clarified what wouldn’t be good enough.

“We didn’t want an AI tool,” he says. “We wanted a personal injury AI tool.”

They needed AI that spoke “Ontario Tort”

Howard Blitstein, one of Wagman’s partners, quarterbacked the initial research into AI products for the firm. Their mass tort and class action work gives them a strong presence at AAJ, especially for a Canadian firm, which meant they were seeing a wide range of tools aimed at litigators.

But a generic AI wasn’t going to cut it.

“We know that what we do is different from what many litigators do,” Wagman says. “The types of documents we’re looking at are different. It’s about understanding the connections between the medical terminology, the rehabilitation, and how that plays out from a damages perspective.”

They also needed something tuned to Ontario’s specific environment.

“Being a personal injury lawyer in Ontario is very different from being a personal injury lawyer anywhere else,” he says. “And being a motor vehicle personal injury lawyer in Ontario is different again. Our work is very statute- and regulatory-driven.”

What good is an AI tool that doesn’t understand a subdural hematoma?

If he asks a general-purpose AI to “find me the strongest three reports and pull the best quotes that support our threshold argument,” he expects a blank stare back.

“Most AI would look at me with glazed-over eyes and say, ‘What is he talking about?’ Same thing if I ask, ‘How much did my client get in IRBs?’ Without technology grounded specifically in what we do here in Ontario, it has limited utility.”

When he talks about a client’s broken leg, the tool has to know he means a displaced fracture of the femoral head. When he’s looking for evidence of a brain injury, it has to recognize that a subdural hematoma on MRI is critical. The connections between those findings, causation, and damages are where their cases live.

Howard quickly identified Supio as a leading contender. He and his law clerk took it on for an initial trial. The expectation was that they’d evaluate it for months. But that changed quickly.

“It became clear early on that delaying rollout was just going to delay training and people’s ability to learn how to use a very powerful tool,” Wagman says. “We started rolling it out across the firm within a month or two.”

A partner in product design

What stood out wasn’t just what Supio could do out of the box, but how it responded to feedback.

“The thing I keep hearing from staff is how amazing it is that Supio is so open to hearing our feedback. And more importantly, that they action it,” Wagman says. “Our experience with tech providers has usually been, ‘That’s a great idea, we’ll look into that,’ and then maybe a year later something happens, maybe it doesn’t.”

With Supio, the experience has been different.

“They’re not just building for ‘personal injury lawyers in North America,’” he says. “They’re building something that works for Howie, Sacks & Henry in Toronto.”

The mediation memo before Supio

For a complex PI case, Wagman will typically have another lawyer, a senior law clerk, and several support staff on the file. 

They gather clinical notes and records from family doctors and specialists, treatment provider records, police materials, statements, prescription and medical summaries, transcripts from examinations for discovery, and expert reports from both sides.

On top of that sits a huge first-party “accident benefits” file that runs in parallel with the tort side like insurer medical reports, records, and detailed documentation of treatment costs and income replacement benefits.

When a mediation is scheduled, he gives the instruction: we have a date six to eight months out, I want to see a mediation memo at least two months before so I can put my magic on it.

That kicks off a heavy process.

“You’re working through all of those documents (often not for the first time) highlighting what seem in the moment to be the most important quotes,” Adam says. “Five reports and 20,000 pages of medical and insurance records later, you may realize those weren’t the points that mattered most. Instead, you uncover a detail that contradicts what we thought about the case, or something you hadn’t yet seen. That item gets pulled out and placed in a separate section for follow-up.”

Hours go into distilling the file down into summaries, key quotes, and key witnesses before drafting even starts.

And then there’s the second kind of stress.

“It’s not just the time,” he says. “It’s ‘What did I miss?’ Was there an important quote I missed? A report I didn’t reference? Something a witness said that really refutes the defense argument, but I didn’t catch it? That anxiety slows the review process down and slows drafting down.”

The same work that used to take 8–25 hours now takes about 30 minutes because Supio builds the foundational summary in a single structured pass.

How Supio changes the starting point

Supio doesn’t replace Wagman’s or his team’s judgment. What it does is “foundationalize” their understanding of a case as they move toward a mediation brief.

“Supio helps me give my associates and clerks a better starting point,” he says. “Instead of handing them a raw file no one’s really synthesized, we come out of a session with Supio with structure, direction, and context that’s actually helpful.”

Rather than spending days manually extracting and re-highlighting material they’ve already read, his team can ask targeted questions of Supio, get a structured chronology or summary, and see exactly where in the record each point comes from.

“We’ve found that having a closed AI system substantially decreases the possibilities for hallucinations or just wrong answers,” he notes. “You ask it to link to the document and the specific page, you look at it, and as often as not you’re thinking, ‘Wow.’”

From there, Wagman still does the work only he can do.

“I still need to make sure it makes sense and is consistent, and I need to add advocacy,” he says. “I know who the other lawyer is, who their insurance adjuster is, who the mediator or pretrial judge is. I know which buttons to push. That’s not going away.”

Measuring a doctor’s testimony against 20,000 pages

One case stands out for him: a complex medical negligence matter that a partner was handling.

“When people spend a lot of time in [the] hospital, one thing hospitals are really good at is keeping records,” he says. “If you’re there for a month, the records will be thousands of pages.”

Traditionally, measuring the doctor’s version against all that material is painful and incomplete.

But with Supio, his partner could put the doctor’s words into the system and measure them against roughly 20,000 pages of medical records.

“In seconds, with deep understanding, it could check that evidence against the contemporaneous records,” Wagman says. “And it found inconsistencies.”

If the doctor’s evidence had lined up perfectly and been believed, there might not have been a case. The “needle in a haystack” inconsistencies made a critical difference.

“We’ve got the best team in the world,” he says. “Great people trying to find needles in haystacks. But why spend 10 or 20 hours of someone’s time on something a tool can surface in minutes? That was a game changer.”

Making it easy for the other side to look honestly at the file

Crucially, Supio also helps Wagman make life easier for the other side’s team.

When defense lawyers say they share the goal of resolving cases for a reasonable amount of money based on the victim’s circumstances, they also need to show their own clients that they’ve done the work. 

“Full productions” usually means sending their clerk and junior lawyer off to spend days sifting through everything the plaintiff produced and building their own summary.

“What if I can save them that time?” Wagman asks. “I can send a summary with annotations: here’s something about my client’s loss of income… check page 26 of the income loss report… their tax returns are on pages three and four…here’s what to know about their prognosis after surgery... it's on page X of this doctor’s report.”

By handing over a clear, annotated narrative grounded in evidence, he helps defense counsel and adjusters see the case through a lens that’s fairer to his client, while still letting them make their own judgment.

A better way to tell each client’s story

At the end of the day, Wagman comes back to what his clients actually want.

“They want me to resolve their cases reasonably, as efficiently as possible, for every penny they’re entitled to,” he says. “Supio helps me do that.”