{"id":155570,"date":"2026-06-30T06:00:30","date_gmt":"2026-06-30T14:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2026\/06\/30\/supio-hires-coo-of-nevadas-largest-pi-firm-as-its-first-vp-of-industry-to-help-drive-innovation-strategy\/"},"modified":"2026-06-30T06:00:30","modified_gmt":"2026-06-30T14:00:30","slug":"supio-hires-coo-of-nevadas-largest-pi-firm-as-its-first-vp-of-industry-to-help-drive-innovation-strategy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2026\/06\/30\/supio-hires-coo-of-nevadas-largest-pi-firm-as-its-first-vp-of-industry-to-help-drive-innovation-strategy\/","title":{"rendered":"Supio Hires COO of Nevada\u2019s Largest PI Firm As Its First VP of Industry, To Help Drive Innovation Strategy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Supio, the AI platform built for plaintiffs\u2019 personal injury firms, has hired Melissa Graham, chief operating officer of Nevada\u2019s Richard Harris Law Firm for the last 15 years, as its vice president of industry, a newly created role aimed at narrowing the gap between the people who build legal technology and the people who actually [\u2026]<\/p>\n

Supio<\/a>, the AI platform built for plaintiffs\u2019 personal injury firms, has hired Melissa Graham<\/a>, chief operating officer of Nevada\u2019s Richard Harris Law Firm<\/a> for the last 15 years, as its vice president of industry, a newly created role aimed at narrowing the gap between the people who build legal technology and the people who actually run law firms.<\/p>\n

The company, which has raised over $90 million in venture funding<\/a>, describes the hire as reflective of a shift underway in PI law, with firms no longer questioning AI\u2019s place in their practices but rather how best to build it into the way they operate so it delivers direct value to legal teams as well as client cases.<\/p>\n

As both a longtime COO and a Supio customer, Graham, who will start at Supio on July 27, has seen that shift firsthand and is joining Supio to help firms navigate the opportunity, the company says.<\/p>\n

\u2018Closet Tech Fanatic\u2019<\/h3>\n

In an exclusive pre-announcement interview with LawSites, Graham described herself as \u201ca bit of a closet tech fanatic.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the interview, also joined by Supio CEO and co-founder Jerry Zhou<\/a>, both described the hire as driven by their belief that the next phase of AI adoption in personal injury will be won less on raw technical capability than on whether firms can figure out how to put that capability to work.<\/p>\n

Graham started working in a law firm at 19 as a photocopy clerk, she said, and has since \u201cdone everything from copy room to paralegal, to case manager to intake accounting.\u201d She has spent the bulk of her career at Richard Harris, which describes itself as the largest PI firm in Nevada and one of the largest in the western U.S.<\/p>\n

Graham said the firm, a Supio customer since early last year, employs roughly 180 people, including some 30 lawyers, handling auto, workers\u2019 compensation, medical malpractice, nursing home and other personal injury matters.<\/p>\n

Zhou said it is exactly that operator\u2019s vantage point that Supio was looking for in bringing Graham aboard.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe needed the expertise,\u201d Zhou said, describing Graham as a \u201cthought partner\u201d in helping to drive the company\u2019s evolution from generative AI with a human in the loop to completely agentic AI.<\/p>\n

Encoding that kind of operational knowledge \u201cinto the feet of agents,\u201d he said, is \u201cso incredibly important, and you\u2019re just not going to be able to replicate that without having kind of world-class operations expertise.\u201d<\/p>\n

Graham described her role as \u201cbridging the gap.\u201d The recurring problem in legal tech, she said, is that vendors \u201chave built tech, but they\u2019ve never run a law firm, and you\u2019ve run a law firm, but you\u2019ve never built tech,\u201d leaving each side unsure what questions to ask the other. \u201cNow being able to speak both languages is what\u2019s super exciting to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

PI Firms Came Late to AI<\/h3>\n

Graham sees PI law as one of the last corners of the legal profession to modernize. \u201cAlthough AI and tech has been around for years,\u201d she said, \u201cwhen you talk to PI firms and operators, we feel like it came in like a wrecking ball.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

CEO and cofounder Jerry Zhou<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The reason, she believes, is structural. High-volume plaintiffs\u2019 firms are built for rapid growth and \u201cnever wanted to slow down long enough\u201d to adopt new tech, which is also \u201cwhy there\u2019s a lot of challenge in our space with execution and adoption.\u201d<\/p>\n

Zhou said the company came out of stealth roughly two years ago as the first to bring generative AI to personal injury, and that as of this quarter it is the first to ship \u201ca truly agentic product\u201d for the industry.<\/p>\n

He said its Supio Agent, launched last month, moves \u201cbeyond tools that make individual tasks faster toward a system that makes entire firms smarter.\u201d<\/p>\n

Asked about AI adoption \u2014 and specifically about studies showing that even firms that are buying AI are not using it to its full potential \u2014 Zhou pointed to a timing mismatch. PI firms \u201chave embedded so much process into their systems\u201d that two years \u201cis like probably a very short amount of time to digest technology,\u201d even as the underlying tools change at the pace of \u201cdog years.\u201d<\/p>\n

Graham\u2019s perspective from inside a firm was that resistance breaks down socially. There are always a few skeptics, she said, but adoption tends to spread by a \u201cdomino effect\u201d once colleagues start comparing notes \u2014 and the greater hesitancy, she added, often sits with staff rather than lawyers.<\/p>\n

An Opportunity to Make a Difference<\/h3>\n

Graham, who remains with the firm until she starts with Supio next month, said her first weeks at Supio will be spent listening rather than going in \u201cguns a-blazing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Beyond law firms such as Richard Harris, she pointed to the mastermind groups and conferences where PI operators compare notes as the biggest opportunity she looks forward to. \u201cThe best part about it is I get to really make a difference, not only here, but across the industry.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition to her COO role, Graham is co-founder of Ascend Consulting and sits on Supio\u2019s customer advisory board. Supio is backed by Sapphire Ventures and Thomson Reuters Ventures, among others.<\/p>\n

\u201cMelissa has spent her career inside the firms we exist to serve, which means she understands what this work actually demands of the people who do it,\u201d said Zhou. \u201cShe has lived the high-stakes reality of plaintiff law, and has seen what is possible when firms have better access to their firm\u2019s knowledge and expertise at scale.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Supio, the AI platform built for plaintiffs\u2019 personal injury firms, has hired Melissa Graham, chief operating officer of Nevada\u2019s Richard Harris Law Firm for the last 15 years, as its vice president of industry, a newly created role aimed at narrowing the gap between the people who build legal technology and the people who actually […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":155571,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-155570","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lawsite"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/xira.com\/p\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Supio-Hires-Melissa-Graham-Featured-1024x576-GeKNTN.png?fit=1024%2C576&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155570","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155570"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155570\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/155571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}