Flying on Autopilot: How In-House Lawyers Use AI Agents to Transform Corporate Legal Departments

You could say in-house legal is having its AI moment. Agentic AI enables corporates to not only automate existing work but also to insource additional tasks currently bveing shipped out to external providers. It requires a change in mindset as much as an upgrade in technology. Mathieu Van Assche comes on the podcast to talk about an outcome-driven approach to helping corporate legal departments make the transition from viewing AI as a copilot to viewing it as a way to put work on autopilot.

Mathieu does GTM and strategy fpr Flank, a company that deploys AI agents inside enterprise in-house legal teams. Rather than selling a software product and walking away, Mathieu describes the need to guarantee outcomes, operating closer to how a legal service provider would than a traditional SaaS vendor.

Mathieu walks through how to tackle the high-volume, lower-complexity work — NDAs, MSAs, first-pass contract reviews, intake Q&A — that quietly consumes most of a legal team's bandwidth. The agents live where lawyers already work (primarily in shared email inboxes), handle tasks asynchronously overnight if needed, and escalate for approval only what genuinely requires human judgment. The goal: get the work off the lawyer's desk without changing how the lawyer operates.

Key Topics Covered:

**From software to services.** Being an outcome provider rather than a software tool. This mirrors how legal service providers have traditionally been engaged — and is part of a broader market shift that investors like Sequoia are actively discussing.

**The copilot vs. autopilot distinction.** There's a line between AI that assists you while you work (copilot) and AI that does the work in the background and only escalates when it needs your judgment (autopilot/agent). The goal: lawyers review and approve; they don't babysit.

**Individual AI vs. institutional AI.** Individuals feel the 10x productivity boost from AI long before companies do. Bolting AI onto existing workflows won't move the needle — organizations need to rethink from first principles how work gets done.

**The data layer problem.** Unlocking context buried across siloed corporate systems — emails, SharePoints, CLMs, legacy databases. This is where the next wave of agent innovation will come from - but we're not there yet. Permissions, data fidelity, and source-of-truth questions all remain hard problems.

**Governance and supervision.** Everything starts supervised. Over time, as clients build trust in the agents' outputs, supervision can be relaxed and more workflows automated.

**Setting realistic expectations.** AI need not be 100% accurate before it's useful. No legal department operates at 100% accuracy today — the baseline already includes human errors, missed questions, and outsourced work.

About the Guest:

Mathieu is Operations & Go-to-Market Lead at Flank ((https://flank.ai)), which focuses on deploying AI agents for enterprise in-house legal teams. His background spans corporate finance, private equity, and chief-of-staff roles at tech scale-ups.

*Version Up is hosted by Kaj Rozga. Music by Bretty Ryback*