Can AI Be Your Family Lawyer?

AI is making inroads into almost every aspect of our lives. In this video Ursula Rice explores the ways in which Artificial Intelligence can help you with your family law matters.

No time to watch the video? Here’s the transcript:

Hi, my name is Ursula Rice and welcome to this video about AI and family law.

Can AI be your family lawyer?

I think the answer is ‘a little bit’, but more is coming down the line.

Generative artificial intelligence, AI, is based on large language models. So it’s hoovering up all the language from all across the internet and starting to put it together and spit it out in a coherent, cohesive way.

It would be really useful to you if you are in correspondence – engaging in a written dialogue – between you and perhaps a firm of solicitors. I think that that’s a really good place to use AI.

Give some prompts to AI – for example, “AI, I want to write a letter in which I set out why my husband needs to spend a little bit more every month in the maintenance allowance he makes for me until we sort this out. Please can you write me a letter about that? Here are some numbers.”

And you can refine it, can’t you? You can ask it to be more formal in tone or say, “please incorporate these numbers or this fact into the letter”. So with a few iterations, I think you could make a decent bit of correspondence.

The second thing to bear in mind with correspondence is that it really improves people’s tone. It tends to make everything a bit less emotional. Perhaps quite formulaic, but it still helps give correspondence that’s easier to read, better spelled, and might say better than you can what you want to say. So I think it’s very useful for that.

Be really, really careful of asking it to draft more complicated stuff – for example, a settlement letter – or asking it to suggest cases. There is very recent case law in which somebody produced a note in a housing case in which there were cases referred to which were hallucinations. They were just not true. It was a very young barrister, who I for one feel very sorry for.

Don’t forget, everyone who’s reading your AI letters, they know that AI wrote it. We really do have a sense for this; sometimes there are  Americanisms in there, or slightly generic, formulaic wording. It just doesn’t feel quite as pointy and punchy as something written by a human. Sometimes the subject matter is just wrong. The answer posited or the hypothesis put is just not making sense to a lawyer who’s been doing this for a long time. At that point, you’re probably going to lose credibility.

So if you are a lawyer, I would suggest you be very careful using AI.

If you are a client, I think it can be really useful to get across your points. The other thing it’s really helpful for is any of the kind of AI assistance that will scoop up language in a conversation and then turn it into a note of what happened for you. That is probably, I would say, far and away one of the best ways of capturing what your lawyer is saying to you in formal meetings – for example, a Teams meeting.

So, can AI be your family lawyer? Not yet, It can be a great tool, but it’s still just a tool. It’s not the hand that wields it. So exercise caution and there’s nothing wrong with having a bit of legal advice and some AI in your armoury.