Family lawyers say AI chatbots are wrecking divorce cases

The latest:

Chatbot-generated legal advice is now landing routinely on family lawyers’ desks, and courts are pushing back. In a spring survey of 133 lawyers at the national firm Cordell & Cordell, 80% said clients had sent them correspondence, draft pleadings or strategy suggestions they believed were produced with AI, the Wall Street Journal reported. Judges in several states have rejected the filings and threatened penalties.

Details:

• The count: Damien Charlotin, an adjunct professor at UC Law San Francisco who tracks AI-generated errors in court cases, has counted 148 family-law rulings in which judges flagged fabricated citations or other apparent AI mistakes, according to the Journal. More than 100 of those rulings came this year.
• The prenup case: Toronto family lawyer Steven Benmor said a client emailed him a 13-part list of revisions to a prenuptial agreement, nearly as long as the prenup itself. Some went so deep into technical detail that Benmor said no person would have produced them. His advice: don’t pay a human expert to argue with a robot expert.
• The cost gap: Logan Burns, a 35-year-old pastor and roofing salesman in LaGrange, Georgia, paid a $2,500 retainer when his marriage collapsed, then faced a $7,000 quote when the custody fight moved to Montana. He paid $19.99 a month for a chatbot instead.
• What went wrong: Burns said the chatbot pointed him to a rule generally letting a state decide custody after a child has lived there six months, so he wrote the judge arguing the court lacked jurisdiction. The judge told him in open court that emergencies are an exception, and Burns had filed an emergency request himself.
• The outcome: Burns told the judge the chatbot gave him baseline information but not the interpretation of law. He now has temporary custody of his children and the case is ongoing. He credited the tool anyway, saying it had done the work of a lawyer or at least a paralegal.
• One-sided inputs: Los Angeles family lawyer Hossein Berenji said a wellness-company owner asked a chatbot whether a judge would cut his spousal support after his income dropped, and was told he had an easy win. Berenji said the bot never requested financial statements or spending records and simply accepted the client’s own account.
• The bill: Berenji said the man persuaded his first lawyer to follow that strategy in a late-2024 filing; the other side used the attached company records to argue his income hadn’t truly fallen, and a judge agreed about a year later. A forensic accountant later found spoiled inventory had cut his take-home despite strong sales.
• Filings as pressure: Denver lawyer Maha Kamal said a mostly self-represented father filed nine motions accusing her client of violating court orders, one citing a legal principle that doesn’t exist. The judge warned he could be ordered to pay the mother’s legal fees. He denied using AI and argued nothing prohibited it; the parents eventually settled.
• Court sanction: A Florida husband representing himself in his divorce and using AI filed at least 145 motions, then sent an appeals court 45 AI-generated pages plus an 863-page appendix, according to court records cited by the Journal. In May, the court ordered its clerk to reject his future filings unless signed by a lawyer.

Background:

Family law covers prenups, divorces and custody disputes, where the two sides routinely disagree on the underlying facts. Lawyers say that makes it a poor fit for tools that answer instantly from a single party’s version of events, at any hour and for a monthly subscription fee.

Between the lines:

The pattern across the cases is consistent: the chatbot supplied a rule but not the exceptions, as in the Montana jurisdiction argument, and accepted a client’s framing without the records that would have tested it, as in the spousal-support filing. Kamal’s assessment is that the volume of filings can itself function as litigation abuse, a reading the Florida clerk order appears to support.

What’s next

Watch whether more courts follow Florida in barring unrepresented litigants’ filings without an attorney signature, whether fee sanctions are actually imposed, and whether Charlotin’s count of flagged family-law rulings keeps climbing past this year’s 100-plus.