The dangers of asking AI about your divorce or family situation
More and more of the people who contact us have already asked an AI chatbot about their situation before they speak to us. Some arrive with printouts. We understand completely. Family breakdown is one of the most stressful experiences life can throw at you, legal costs are a genuine worry, and a chatbot is free, available at 3am and never makes you feel foolish for asking.
So we want to be straight with you about what these tools can and cannot do – not to frighten you away from technology, but because we have watched what happens when confident-sounding AI output is mistaken for legal advice. Family law, as it happens, is one of the areas where that mistake costs people most.
Tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Claude are large language models. They generate text by predicting what plausibly comes next, word by word – they do not look anything up, and they have no concept of whether what they produce is true.
The Solicitors Regulation Authority made exactly this point in its Risk Outlook report on artificial intelligence, warning that these systems can produce highly plausible results that are simply incorrect. The technical term is ‘hallucination’, and it is not a rare glitch; it is a feature of how the technology works.
That would matter less if the errors looked like errors. They do not. AI output arrives polished, structured and assured – the register of an expert – and the systems are designed to be agreeable, which means they tend to tell you what you appear to want to hear. A hesitant wrong answer invites checking. A confident wrong answer invites belief. In our experience, the more neatly an AI answer supports your position, the more suspicious of it you should be.
In Harber v HMRC [2023] UKFTT 1007 (TC), a litigant in person put nine tribunal decisions before the tax tribunal in support of her appeal. Every one of them was fabricated, apparently by an AI tool. Some of the invented cases closely resembled real ones – except that in the genuine versions, the taxpayer had lost. The tribunal accepted that she had acted in good faith. She still lost, and paid the penalty.
Qualified lawyers have fallen into the same trap. In June 2025 the High Court gave judgment in Ayinde v London Borough of Haringey and Al-Haroun v Qatar National Bank [2025] EWHC 1383 (Admin), two cases heard together by the President of the King’s Bench Division precisely because of their common feature.
In one, a barrister’s court documents cited five cases that did not exist. In the other, a witness statement supporting a £90 million claim contained 45 citations, 18 of them fictitious, with many of the genuine ones misdescribed. Wasted costs were ordered and the lawyers were referred to their regulators. The court’s assessment of a tool such as ChatGPT was blunt: it is not capable of conducting reliable legal research. Further examples reached UK tribunals within months, involving people who had trusted AI output entirely in good faith.
The Bar Council had warned as early as January 2024 that these tools can generate convincing but false content. ‘Convincing’ is the operative word.
Even setting hallucination aside, there is a deeper problem, and it is particularly acute in family work: family law in England and Wales is largely discretionary. It does not run on formulas.
There is no calculator for a financial remedy order on divorce or the dissolution of a civil partnership. The court weighs the specific circumstances of the specific family – needs, resources, contributions, the length of the marriage or civil partnership, the needs of any children – to arrive at an appropriate outcome for that family. Two situations that look identical in a two-paragraph summary can properly end in quite different orders because of a pension, a health condition, a date or a document.
When a chatbot tells you what you ‘will’ get, or what a court ‘must’ order, it is overpromising by design. No honest family lawyer guarantees an outcome; a language model does it routinely.
Child arrangements are decided the same way: by reference to the welfare of the individual child, not by rules of thumb. And here AI has a further habit worth knowing about. Because these systems are trained on decades of internet text from around the world, they frequently reach for terminology that is outdated or belongs to another jurisdiction entirely – ‘custody’ and ‘access’ rather than child arrangements orders, American concepts such as ‘alimony’ or community property, or Scottish law presented as if it applied in England and Wales. An answer built on the wrong country’s law, or on law that was repealed years ago, can sound perfectly authoritative.
A trained lawyer’s first skill is not reciting the law. It is knowing which questions to ask about you – testing your account, spotting what is missing, and identifying the detail you did not think mattered. A chatbot answers the question as asked. It cannot know what it has not been told, and it will not tell you that the question itself was the wrong one.
What you discuss with a barrister or solicitor is confidential and generally protected by legal professional privilege – it cannot normally be forced into evidence against you. What you type into a public chatbot enjoys no such protection. Depending on the service and your settings, it may be stored, reviewed by humans or used to train future systems, and it is not privileged. In family proceedings – where finances, allegations and the welfare of children are all in play – pasting the details of your situation into a chatbot is, in legal terms, closer to discussing it with a stranger than to consulting an adviser. Please think carefully before you do.
We are not going to pretend AI is useless; the senior judiciary itself has acknowledged that, used cautiously and responsibly, it has real benefits, and we agree. Used well, an AI tool can help you get oriented before you speak to a lawyer: understanding terminology in plain English, learning broadly what a process such as divorce, dissolution or a financial remedy application involves, and pulling your own dates, documents and chronology into order. Clients who arrive prepared in this way ask sharper questions and use their time with us more cost-effectively – and we welcome it.
The line is crossed the moment AI output is treated as advice: relied on for a decision, a deadline, a document or anything put before a court. Anything an AI tells you about the law should be checked against primary sources – legislation on legislation.gov.uk, judgments on the National Archives case law service or BAILII – or, better, with a regulated professional. That is now the standard the High Court demands even of qualified lawyers using these tools. It should certainly be yours.
The honest objection to ‘speak to a lawyer’ is cost, so it deserves an honest answer.
Heritage Park Family Law brings together barristers and solicitors who share the same values and the same specialism. Every member of our team is an experienced expert in family law – this is not a general practice fitting family work around everything else – and all of us work to Resolution’s non-confrontational principles, seeking constructive outcomes rather than needless conflict.
Whoever advises you, you are dealing with a regulated professional whose working life is spent in this field, and who will discuss costs openly with you from the outset. For many people navigating separation, divorce, dissolution, financial matters or arrangements for children, that combination of deep specialism and cost transparency is exactly what a chatbot cannot offer.
And unlike a chatbot, our regulated professionals come with an entire protection system: professional training and regulation – by the Bar Standards Board and the Solicitors Regulation Authority – a duty to act in your best interests, compulsory professional indemnity insurance, confidentiality and legal professional privilege, and the Legal Ombudsman if something goes wrong. When an AI answer is wrong, there is no duty owed to you, no insurance, no ombudsman – and, as the courts have now made clear, no sympathy from a judge for having relied on it.
Since 1994 we have helped people across England and Wales through separation, divorce, dissolution, financial matters and arrangements for children. Our advice is not generated by predicting the next plausible word. It is built on your actual circumstances, tested against the law as it stands today, and given by someone who is trained, insured, accountable and bound to act in your best interests.
By all means use AI to prepare. But when it comes to decisions that shape your finances, your home and your children’s future, speak to someone who stands behind what they tell you. We are happy to be that someone.
To get expert and accurate legal advice speak to one of our qualified lawyers, as one thing you can be sure of at Heritage Park Family Law, is that we know family matters.
To arrange an initial discussion, please contact us on 01525 406030 or fill in our enquiry form today.
