AI and family law: should you be concerned?
Should you be concerned about AI when consulting a lawyer? Director Rita Gupta explains its potential for efficiency and cost savings for family law clients, but advises healthy scepticism too.
AI (artificial intelligence) has been hitting the headlines recently, but in reality it’s nothing new. AI has been shaping our lives for years, from predicting our shopping habits to powering search engines and virtual assistants on our phones. Director Rita Gupta looks into the reasons we should all be mindful of AI, and treat it with a “healthy dollop of scepticism”. (6)
We all like to be efficient, to save time, to find ways to do things better. Here at LGFL, we are keen to utilise AI for efficiency and (ultimately) cost savings for you when you come to us as a client. As a result, we are acutely aware of the potential benefits - but also the pitfalls. AI is something that’s been around since the 1950s, as IBM’s website explains. “Artificial intelligence (AI) is technology that enables computers and machines to simulate human learning, comprehension, problem solving, decision making, creativity and autonomy.” (1)
What’s new is that it’s now accessible to so many of us to use. The Oxford English Dictionary explains how AI tools are: “Software used to perform tasks or produce output previously thought to require human intelligence, esp. by using machine learning to extrapolate from large collections of data.” (5)
As a boutique family law firm, we see AI as the basis for a valuable toolkit of apps and software we can use to help you as our client, but not to replace what we both value most, human interaction. Behind every court case are individuals like you with a unique set of circumstances. Understanding these is key to helping us find outcomes that best suit you and your family.
When we meet with you for the first time, AI might power our virtual video meeting, it might transcribe our conversation and summarise it for easier reading. However, it is us as humans, as lawyers, as empathetic professionals that see how worried you might be, appreciate the daily stresses you are under, and what your ideal outcome would be. That helps us form a genuine relationship and partnership with you, and create a legal strategy far stronger and more personalised than any AI-generated suggestions ever could.
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EI, not AI
As established Legal 500 family lawyers, we have two qualities that AI can never truly replicate: experience and instinct.
Experience is not just standing up in court or preparing cases. It is knowing which judges like evidence presented in a particular way, or that last time we had a similar case, how one approach worked well. Experience allows us to take a holistic overview of complex and often emotional cases, especially those involving children. So we can draw on that wealth of relevant and practical experience when dealing with your particular case.
Instinct, in my opinion, is a highly under-rated quality. As lawyers, we see the darker side of society, and often it’s our instincts that guide us to dig a little deeper. Instinct (rather than proof) may lead us to question if your estranged spouse is hiding assets, for example. Equally, it often helps us sort the reality from the rhetoric.
Increasingly our lawyer’s instincts may be called on more often as AI becomes better at generating video, audio and imagery, creating so-called ‘deep fakes’. That’s why, in the words of Neil Lawrence, DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Cambridge, when interviews on BBC Radio 4: “We need to learn how to embrace AI, albeit with a healthy dollop of scepticism.” (6)
Mind your language
AI can be helpful, informative and interactive, but it is a massive jump to assume it writes, let alone thinks, like a human. As explained above, AI is based on data, not knowledge, and that’s where the problems can start in family law.
Much of the headlines have involved output from generative AI based on large language models (LLMs). LLMs systems such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Copilot ‘train’ themselves by drawing on huge amounts of written words to understand how words, character and sentences are put together. They then
can create new written text on almost any subject, and sound authentic and plausible.
The main issue is that generative AI does not check its own output. As the Law Society guidance says: “Generative AI … lacks the capability to understand its output and meaning in
the same way that humans do. This means that generative AI cannot autonomously validate or audit the accuracy of its results. It may even create false outputs.” (4) When AI systems produce this kind of fictional / fake information, these are known as AI “hallucinations”. (7).
Five fakes and a bemused judge
The Law Gazette recently reported that a lawyer presented no less than five fake case citations (examples of previous cases used to support their case) in a UK court. The judge was particularly confused by this as the barrister actually had a good case without the citations.
What made the situation worse was the unprofessional and dismissive attitude of the legal professionals involved in presenting the case: “The issue appeared to be brushed off by the lawyers involved when the truth was revealed. These were not, as the barrister claimed, ‘minor citation errors’ nor were they ‘cosmetic errors’ as argued by the solicitors.“ (2)
The suspicion was that these fictitious cases had been created by large-language model artificial intelligence software.
When in doubt, ask
The Law Gazette article was particularly concerned was that nobody checked these case citations before they were presented. The output was taken at face value. For the article author, it highlighted the issue of young legal professionals who trained or worked during lockdown at home, separated from more experienced and knowledgeable colleagues.
As one lawyer quoted by the Law Gazette said: “The most effective and speedy way that relevant case law was previously identified was in conversation with more senior colleagues in chambers or law firms. How many of those chambers or firms are now lacking those who might provide young lawyers with guidance, as the experienced older heads take up the benefits of flexible working?”
At LGFL, our legal and admin team all work alongside our two Directors. The Directors are always available for any of the team to ask questions, and we are proud of how we take time and care to coach and mentor our trainee solicitors. (For more details see here: https://lgfamilylawyers.co.uk/internship-mentoring/).
We maintain a constant physical presence in our Swallowfield office, and a real human being will be answering the phone during office hours, rather than numerous annoying options!
We also double-check everything, and we certainly don’t rely on generative AI to create any case citations, advice, or strategies for you as our client.
Keeping your data safe
We are also extremely careful with your data, and ensure that it is secure. Over and above the standard safeguards, we carefully vet all AI applications we use so we know how and where data that it processes is dealt with.
As the Judiciary guidelines suggest, we should all be very circumspect withwhat we type into any software that “simulates an online human conversation using generative AI”, such as a chat bot. “Do not enter any information into a public AI chatbot that is not already in the public domain. Do not enter information which is private or confidential. Any information that you input into a public AI chatbot should be seen as being published to all the world.” (8)
Personal, empathetic and pragmatic legal advice
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