The Part Artificial Intelligence Can and Can’t Play in Family Law
While AI can be a valuable tool in divorce, custody, and other family law matters, over-reliance on this pervasive technology can be detrimental to an individual client’s unique case.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be a valuable tool for many industries. The tool’s popularity crosses many sectors, including information providers, science, business, health, and technical applications. However, everyday use by educators, job applicants, food services, and anyone who needs to write or research is growing more widespread. AI has even made its way into the legal field, and the technology only promises to expand more in the coming years.
AI is a revolutionary tool that can improve efficiency and information gathering to help lawyers and clients make decisions. The essential advantage of AI is the speed with which it can analyze large bodies of data and information, including analyzing lengthy documents and bodies of case law. When family law attorneys can access the case law history of a specific case or statute or analyze a spouse’s massive haul of business documents, they can develop strategies and help clients decide how to proceed in divorce, child custody, support, and property division matters.
However, family law is human relationship-oriented, not merely data-informed. Child custody, spousal support, and property division calculations are not merely mathematical. They are more nuanced due to the human component. Emotions and relationships are not machine-generated or weighed in AI analyses. Moreover, privacy concerns over sensitive information and AI use are a problem for family law issues. AI is always collecting data for training, so sensitive information about children and families may inadvertently be revealed, causing trust, legal compliance, and security issues.
The Part that AI Can Play in Family Law Matters
AI can be a powerful assistant for family lawyers, taking on tasks that used to be very time-consuming; here are some specific examples of how AI is being used or could be used:
1. Reviewing Documents
Family lawyers can use AI to review business, financial, and legal documents to locate specific items, such as business expenses to a specific creditor, spousal support payments, or clauses in legal documents, such as custody orders. AI can also help lawyers save time in trial preparation by noting the opponent’s contradictory evidence and inconsistent statements.
2. Researching Case Law
AI can also assist a lawyer’s research, analyzing case law with specific rulings that help project a client’s case’s outcome. A lawyer may use AI to find cases like their client’s and study the facts and rulings for relevance to a client’s case.
3. Determining Child Support Figures
AI can calculate child support based on New Jersey’s guidelines so that an attorney has instant essential information for a client who is expecting to pay or receive child support. However, the lawyer must input the correct information and factors of specific cases, like child custody and visitation and parental income, to get an accurate support number. This may still require some adjustment based on the lawyer’s unique knowledge of the client’s case and situation.
4. Mediating Issues
Another use of AI is in online dispute resolution platforms, where divorcing parties mediate issues like child custody and support. The technology can provide creative solutions to help parties compromise and resolve their custody or other divorce concerns. AI can offer solutions others have used to reach agreements in the past. In addition, once the parties reach an agreement, AI can supply the legal documents they need to get their legal agreement signed by a judge. There are some major limitations with this type of technology and a limited population can benefit from such a simple and straightforward approach to solving complex problems with long-term implications, such as is the case with family law matters.
5. Finding Basic Information and Resources
Finally, searchers may use AI to find general information about resources such as documents, information packets, legal aid services, appointment bookings, and mediators.
How Over-Reliance on AI Can Harm Your Family Law Case
Despite its efficiency, AI has limitations and dangers in Family Law. AI works by gathering information from a wide range of sources that may be biased. For instance, earlier child custody decisions favored women as primary caretakers since women more often than men stayed home with children. Social values and trends can skew data AI collects to influence a case outcome, such as which parent will likely get more custodial time with the children.
Child support calculators may also be inaccurate since the output is only as good as the input. Each family situation is unique, and individual factors must be considered to arrive at a fair and accurate child support figure. Similarly, AI cannot account for the emotional component of family law cases. Relationships are complex, and family situations include a range of deep and powerful emotions, such as rejection, love, anger, jealousy, and hatred, all of which cause people to do and say extraordinary things.
AI is unable to calculate the emotional impact on families and may not recommend appropriate resolutions to divorce disputes. The machine cannot factor in empathy or understanding, which play a role in negotiations and agreements. Worse yet, family lawyers who use AI to research client case specifics may inadvertently be exposing their clients to a privacy breach. Lawyers cannot guarantee the security of the AI tools they use and so may be responsible for personal information reaching people or entities that misuse it.
Finally, AI can result in lawyers relying on technology to read, write, research, and analyze laws, rules, and negotiated solutions. As such, family lawyers can lose the analytical skills to create innovative solutions to divorce problems. In trial and motion practice, attorneys can lose their ability to glean new arguments tailored to their clients’ cases from their research, analysis, and critical thinking skills. In other words, they lose the creativity and sharpness that are crucial to resolving difficult and complex issues.
The Irreplaceable Qualities of Human Lawyers in Family Law: Empathy, Creativity, and Client-Centered Advocacy Beyond AI
AI has no gut instincts, no intuition to sense that someone is honest, earnest, or malicious. The human mind and senses inform how attorneys advise and decide how to proceed in family law cases. Additionally, AI cannot substitute for the emotional support and caring family law attorneys offer their clients during the challenging life changes of divorce battles. The ability to relate and empathize is a human connection that builds the trust and compassion a client in turmoil needs.
Along with empathy and personal attention, family lawyers understand the statutes and case law governing divorce and child custody matters and the nuances of those laws as they apply to each client’s circumstances. Talented and experienced attorneys have a feel for the direction of the law and its historical changes to offer the best advice on how to proceed, where to compromise, and where to press forward to a trial, given the current state of the laws and the attitude of the courts.
Moreover, a family law attorney advocates for their client’s best interests, considering the client’s goals, circumstances, and possible legal vulnerability. Their strategy for achieving the client’s goals rests on a complete understanding of what is important to the client. As such, a lawyer navigates the emotionally volatile divorce landscape with a client’s priorities guiding their actions and decisions.
Furthermore, a human advocate can use AI responsibly, avoiding AI pitfalls of privacy and security breaches. They can prevent the tool’s ethical and legal compliance dangers by verifying AI-generated research and information, ensuring that they interpret data that may be incorrect or biased.
Keeping AI in Check Through Transparency and Accountability in Family Law
AI should be used with discretion and caution. A human overseeing its use and verifying its accuracy is a legal and ethical obligation and a source of trust and transparency for the client. As the technology changes and improves, lawyers need to keep up with emerging uses and challenges AI poses. Human judgment still reigns over AI, and every law office needs systems to ensure legal compliance when using AI.
Finding Empathy and Support from an Experienced New Jersey Attorney is Crucial to Navigate Your Family Law Case with Confidence in the Age of AI
AI cannot craft solutions unique to your life and circumstances. It cannot intuit and weigh evidence, sense bias, craft creative approaches to complex problems, and empathize with your situation to support you throughout the process of resolving a divorce, child custody, alimony, child support, domestic violence, marital agreement, or other family law matter. Only an experienced family law attorney can most effectively fight for your rights and help you through a life-changing experience with the compassion and personalized care you deserve. At Montanari Law Group, we take our role as legal professionals in the family law field very seriously and we treat each client like the unique person they are, with the unique perspective and set of priorities they undoubtedly bring to the table.
Contact us at (973) 233-4396 to talk to a family law attorney about your case in a complimentary, confidential consultation. Our office, conveniently located in Little Falls, NJ, has served as a safe haven, a legal resource, and a source of confident representation for clients in Montclair, Millburn, Caldwell, Short Hills, Ridgewood, New Milford, Essex Fells, Woodland Park, Franklin Lakes, Teaneck, Wanaque and throughout Northern New Jersey.