Making mashed potato: why AI will save lawyers from boredom, not their jobs

There is a pervasive fear that autonomous AI replaces the need for legal expertise. The reality is the opposite: it clarifies the value of true expertise by stripping away the drudgery.

The "mashed potato" problem 

One General Counsel described high-volume in-house work as "eating mashed potato". It’s bland, repetitive, endless, and if you stop eating, the plate just fills up again. This is the "shovelling snow while it's snowing" dilemma. When highly paid experts spend their days on this work, they burn out. They also become bottlenecks for the business.

The Chef vs. The Sous Chef 

The best analogy for the future legal team is a commercial kitchen.

• The Lawyer (Head Chef): Focuses on quality control, menu design (playbooks), and high-stakes "VIP" meals (strategic litigation, M&A, sensitive negotiations).
• The Agent (Sous Chef): Stands at the line, handling the standard orders. They can prep the ingredients and cook the standard dishes perfectly 80% of the time.

Supervision: the new skillset 

In this model, the lawyer's primary interaction with the work shifts from doing to supervising. At Flank, we build "Supervision" as a dedicated workflow. The agent doesn't just act; it presents a concise overview of its work and asks the expert to validate it. This allows one senior lawyer to effectively govern the output of an army of agents, amplifying their expertise across the entire enterprise. In practice, this might look like reviewing agent transcripts, flagging issues with responses, setting guardrails, and tracking interactions and intervening directly where needed.

The human touch 

There will always be work requiring a human touch – calling a counterparty to smooth over a relationship or navigating internal politics. Agents clear the "mashed potato" off the plate so lawyers finally have the time to actually do the job they were trained for.