Whatever You Do, Do Not Trust Bots to Write Your Divorce Paperwork
Litigants in family law cases have the right to represent themselves in court; hiring a lawyer is not mandatory. Despite this, almost everyone who can afford to hire a divorce lawyer does. Representing yourself in a divorce case is inadvisable except in the simplest cases, where the parties do not have children together, were married briefly, and are so young that they have never owned valuable assets jointly or separately. Despite this, cash-strapped homeowners who live paycheck to paycheck may attempt to save money by downloading divorce paperwork and filling it out by themselves. At least, family lawyers console themselves with the thought that this is still what people do. When was the last time someone put forth the effort to type individual responses into a form? Now that chatbots can write for us, we give them the simplest prompts, they write unthinkingly, and we accept their written products unthinkingly. You can imagine how disastrous it would be if the hallucinations of chatbots became legally binding documents. In a state not too far from Florida, it has already started to happen. To save your family from the horrors of a chatbot-engineered divorce, contact a Boca Raton divorce lawyer.
If You Think Your Ex Is Delusional, You Should See Your Robo Lawyer
One of the downsides of representing yourself in a divorce case is that, unless your ex hires a lawyer, there is no one but you to reason with your ex. Your ex believed enough advertising hype, enough social media rumors, and enough pseudoscience that you eventually decided that you could no longer stand to be married, but at least you both admit how little you know about the law.
Chatbots, by contrast, sound confident, and exes who are determined not to think take them at their word. Unfortunately, judges sometimes do too. A state Supreme Court recently reversed a family court decision where the petitioner had represented himself and had relied on generative artificial intelligence to draft his divorce petition. Unsurprisingly, the chatbot cited nonexistent court decisions, because chatbots cannot tell the difference between strings of words which represent the names of real court cases and strings of words that merely sound like the names of court decisions. The surprising part is that the trial court judge did not read the petitioner’s petition carefully enough to verify whether the court decisions it cited were real.
There is no harm in drafting your own divorce petition, especially if you and your spouse intend to file for an uncontested divorce. You should ask a lawyer to review it before you submit it, though. The lawyer will be able to catch legal errors or unintended loopholes.
Contact Schwartz | White About Keeping Your Divorce Simple
A South Florida family law attorney can help you accomplish your divorce with as little drama as possible, even in a world where the humans and the bots have gone crazy. Contact Schwartz | White in Boca Raton, Florida about your case.
Source:
abovethelaw.com/2025/07/trial-court-decides-case-based-on-ai-hallucinated-caselaw/
