Almost every piece of new technology has the potential to make life easier for you, but it is easiest to focus on the ways that they annoy you. It is great that your door automatically locks 45 seconds after you leave the house so that you do not have to fumble for your keys as you leave the house with your hands full, but whoever programmed it that way must not have known that, on school days, it takes your kids much longer than 45 seconds to get out the door. It is great that you can dictate text messages on your phone, but its speech-to-text software often misinterprets your Southern accent, and it cannot fathom that your sister’s name is Ashlee with two E’s or that your aunt’s name is Michele with one L.
There are plenty of software companies out there that would love to convince you that they can make your work as a family lawyer less stressful and more efficient, but if you know yourself and technology, most of them will only lead to frustration. You should choose your legal tech devices and software carefully, or even better, leave it to other people to use them. Life is less stressful for family law attorneys not only when the attorneys themselves use the right apps, but also when their employees and clients use them.
Legal Tech in Family Law
Co-Parenting Software Can Help Feuding Ex-Spouses Keep the Peace, Making Your Job Easier
Raising children with your ex-spouse is more stressful than people who have not done it can imagine. If you vent your anger to your ex-spouse, both of you will only get angrier, and this will cause stress for your children. If you confide in your children about how much your ex’s behavior hurts you and makes you angry, your ex can use this against you in court; one of the criteria by which judges determine children’s best interests in parenting plan dispute cases is the extent to which each parent facilitates the children’s wholesome relationship with the other parent. In other words, unless there is domestic violence or drugs involved, it is your job to keep the peace between your children and your ex.
Therefore, a family lawyer is one of the very few people with whom a client can share their true feelings about the stress of co-parenting. As a lawyer, you know not to base your legal advice on someone else’s emotions. Former couples in high-conflict co-parenting situations should communicate through co-parenting messaging apps like Our Family Wizard. These apps keep a record of all of the communications, so you can simply ask your client for a record of the messages so that you can read them yourself and silently decide which parent is overreacting.
Invoicing Software Reduces Attorney-Client Conflict in Complex Divorce Litigation
Some divorce cases drag on for years after a court has declared the parties legally single, and not just the cases where the couple’s financial situation is so complex that the court must bifurcate the proceedings. In your days of reading divorce court decisions on Google Scholar for fun, you probably came across some appeals where the parties were arguing over which spouse’s responsibility it was to pay attorneys’ fees; the parties did not seem to mind that, by continuing to litigate these matters, they were making the legal fees even more expensive, possibly for themselves. The least you can do as a divorce lawyer is to keep accurate records of how much your client owes, and exactly what you and your colleagues were doing that your client or your client’s ex must now pay for. Fortunately, invoicing software can do that even more accurately than any human, even one with a prodigious memory worthy of the legal profession, can do. Even if years go by before you see a penny, there will at least be a clear record of how much money is at stake.
Tread Carefully When Introducing Generative AI to Your Family Law Practice
Chatbots cannot do your job. This is obvious if you have ever seen a chatbot fudge a legal document by adding phony citations that sound, to the untrained robotic sensor, like the names of real court decisions. You probably already use generative AI, though, whether you mean to or not. It helps you fill in the salutations of emails, and it suggests brief responses, even though it takes your human judgment to know that it is unprofessional for a lawyer to respond to a client’s email with, “Thanks for the heads up.” Where generative AI can help you is generating subheadings for blog posts, so that you or your employees can write the body text and end up with a human-sounding blog post in the end.
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