AI is reshaping family law practice, but attorneys worry about DIY research

AI is making inroads in one the most emotional and sensitive areas of legal practice – family law.

Practitioners and AI experts say the capabilities of some digital tools have proven value in several aspects of separation, divorce, child support, custody, and alimony matters, as well as for the general management of office workflows and attorneys’ court appearances.

But they also report that the technology has led to the emergence of clients using ChatGPT, CoPilot and other genAI tools to research their own cases. The practice gives them more general knowledge about the litigation process, but practitioners say it can create unrealistic expectations of the strength and likely outcome of their cases.

Family law practitioner Damian J. Turco of Newburyport, Massachusetts, says that overall, AI has had an “overwhelmingly positive” effect on the profession.

“Used thoughtfully, it has become an incredibly effective tool for streamlining routine work, reducing administrative bottlenecks, and organizing and analyzing large volumes of information,” said Turco, managing partner of Turco Legal and a former president of the Massachusetts Bar Association. “It allows attorneys to spend more of their time doing what only lawyers can do: Exercising judgment, counseling clients, negotiating resolutions, and advocating in court.”

Bettina D. Hindin, a principal at Offit Kurman in New York City, said that clients who come to an initial consultation having done research aided by AI sometimes need to be brought down to earth about the probable outcomes of their cases based on the particular facts and applicable laws in their jurisdiction.

“You have to calm them down a bit and bring them to the reality of their situation,” she said. “Each case is unique.”

Help with financials

Lawyers say AI tools that can digitally absorb, organize, and analyze personal financial records can be of real help in determining parties’ financial resources in separation, divorce, and child custody matters. Such evaluations are a crucial step in determining spousal and child support levels.

Financial AI tools can ferret out suspicious spending or investment patterns that it would take attorneys or law firm staff hours to discover, if they noticed them at all, said Hindin. Those anomalies, if verified by accountants or other forensics experts, can indicate that parties are attempting to hide assets or income, she added.

“But there is a huge caveat,” Hindin cautioned. “It is not a replacement for the work and the judgment of the lawyer. It makes mistakes. It makes a lot of mistakes. As a basic tool to get you in the right arena and help you build a case, it is useful. But check your work.”

Samuel Estreicher, professor of law at New York University School of Law, agreed that AI tools can be useful at “aggregative” tasks, such as absorbing high volumes of information and tabulating or organizing it in a form that lawyers can access. But he said AI can be “problematic” as a tool for legal research because of hallucinations and other inaccuracies.

Cost factors

Half of American law firms employ five attorneys or less, and most family law practices fall into the solo- or small-sized firm category. That means family law firms may not be able to afford licensing the more sophisticated legal AI tools that larger firms regularly deploy.

But Hans Guntren, founder of the legal management services company Deliberately.ai, suggested that the more limited resources of many family law practitioners increases the importance of adopting legal-industry-specific AI technology to add sophistication to their operations.

“Family law is often dismissed as too emotional, too complex, or too fragmented to benefit from technology,” he said in an article written for the American Bar Association earlier this year. “In reality, those are precisely the reasons artificial intelligence is most urgently needed here.”

He noted that a single family law case can involve thousands of pages of financial records, plus years’ worth of text messages between the parties, photographs, medical and psychological records, property records, insurance documents, and other materials – all records that AI can triage and organize faster than any human team could.

Problems with pro se litigants

Another area of family law practice where AI is having a notable effect is in the number of filings by self-represented clients, said Barbara M. Seymour, a professional responsibility and legal ethics specialist at Clawson & Staubes in Columbia, South Carolina.

Seymour said that while general AI tools can make filings by self-represented plaintiffs look polished and sound reasonable, the papers often fail to meet applicable legal requirements and are threatening to overwhelm already crowded court dockets.

Judge Jeffrey S. Sunshine, the coordinating judge for matrimonial matters in the New York state court system, said family attorneys are “cautious” about over relying on AI tools because most lawyers realize that large-language models are “only as good as the information you put into them” and understand the risks of “hallucinated” cases.

Even the most accurate legal AI research materials are no substitute for old-fashioned research on LexisNexis and Westlaw, or in state-specific statute commentaries, Sunshine opined.

“I don’t think that AI is evil,” said Sunshine, who is also a state Supreme Court justice in Brooklyn. “[But] it shouldn’t be your primary source of research. … I don’t think you can rely on it as the be all and end all.”

Hindin agreed that that family law matters should stay “stubbornly human” until the time AI legal tools can be shown to be as “sentient” as human lawyers.

Litigants in divorce or child custody and support cases are going through what for many is the most meaningful legal and personal matters they will face in their lifetimes, and they deserve the compassion and know-how of a lawyer to guide their journeys, she said.

Hindin said a coffee mug on her desk says it all, “Your Google search does not replace my law degree.’”