AI and Your Family Law Case

By Tom Daley and Neda Garrett

A few years ago, “artificial intelligence” belonged in the movies. Now it lives in our pockets. It drafts emails, plans meals, and answers questions people once brought only to a lawyer or a trusted friend.

We see it every week. A client arrives with a detailed list of questions, or a summary of what “the AI” told her about custody in Texas. We understand the impulse. Family transitions are frightening and expensive, and here is something patient and available at two in the morning. If AI has been your comfort lately, you are in good company.

We would simply like to offer a few thoughts before you type your next question.

How We Use AI on Your Behalf

Used well, these tools can lower the cost of a case. We use secure versions of AI to organize thousands of pages of bank statements into readable timelines, to summarize lengthy financial disclosures, and to prepare first drafts of routine documents. Work that once took many billable hours now takes a fraction of that. That is money that stays in your family’s hands.

We also welcome the prepared client. If AI has helped you draft a list of household expenses or sketch a proposed parenting schedule, bring it. That preparation makes our time together more productive.

Where We Ask You to be Careful

Insider secret: your conversations with an AI chatbot are not confidential. The attorney-client privilege protects what you tell us but not what you tell a technology company’s servers. Those conversations are stored. Opposing counsel can request those records and a judge can order you to retrieve them and hand them over.

Pause before you ask a chatbot how to move money before you file for divorce or what to say to a custody evaluator. Vent to your therapist or to us, where conversations are protected. Just not to a machine that keeps a transcript.

Two smaller cautions. First, AI is often confidently wrong about the law. It does not know Texas statutes, your judge, or all the facts of your case. Second, these tools can increase the cost of your case when you send your attorney a 10-page AI-generated email of questions. Your attorney will read everything you send and bill for everything read. Of course, if you have questions, you should ask your attorney. We’re suggesting that you carefully go through that list of AI-generated comments, remove duplicates, and questions you don’t care about. Culling questions reduces the cost of the read and response cycle.

The Bottom Line

Use AI to get organized and to articulate your thoughts. Then bring it all to an attorney who is bound by law to keep your confidence, and who will sit across the table from you and answer honestly.

That part, no machine can replace.

Tom Daley and Neda Garrett are family law attorneys at KoonsFuller, P.C. in Plano, Texas. This article is general information, not legal advice.