November is Family Court Awareness Month, a time to focus on how family courts serve the children and families who pass through their doors. For a growing number of those families, the journey toward family court may happen before they even speak with an attorney or file a legal document. It often begins somewhere new: in an Artificial Intelligence (AI) chat window.

As AI tools have become more accessible, people facing difficult personal and legal decisions are increasingly turning to them for immediate answers. Questions about custody, property division, and the divorce process can feel easier to ask a chatbot than to raise with a spouse or an attorney. But remember: just because a chatbot’s responses may sound authoritative, they aren’t always accurate, and acting on incomplete or incorrect information can have long-term consequences.

Key Takeaways

• AI-generated legal guidance is not always accurate. Chatbots can provide answers that sound confident, but they can easily misstate the law, reinforce incorrect assumptions, and overlook important details of an individual’s circumstances.
• Family court decisions depend on individual circumstances. Questions involving child custody, parenting schedules, and property division require careful consideration of the facts, applicable law, and the best interests of the children.
• AI can be a useful resource but it cannot replace an attorney. It cannot provide individualized legal advice, exercise professional judgment, or advocate in court for a client’s interests.

By way of illustration, consider one divorce, seen from both sides. Enzo and Mila are fictional, but their story is a familiar one to many.

1. Before Filing

Enzo has been contemplating divorce for months. One night, after the kids are asleep, he opens his laptop at the kitchen table and starts asking questions to his handy AI chatbot.

Throughout his marriage to Mila, he has taken the lead on the school drop-offs, the pediatrician visits, and most of the bedtimes for their two children, ages nine and twelve. How do I get full custody? Within seconds, the chatbot lays out a plan.

Enzo has spent sixteen years building his retirement account, and Mila never contributed to it, though she scaled back her own career to run their household. Is it mine? The chatbot explains, persuasively, that retirement savings can be treated as separate property.

Each answer is articulate, confident, and reassuring. None of them, however, asks Enzo a single question back. By the end of the night, he has a vision of how this will go: the children with him most of the time, Mila every other weekend, and his retirement account untouched.

That vision is the first casualty of the case. AI tools are built to answer the question in front of them, not to challenge it. In a 2024 study, researchers at Stanford and Yale found that popular AI models, in versions available in 2023, gave inaccurate answers to verifiable legal questions about federal court cases at least 58 percent of the time, and frequently accepted a user’s mistaken premise rather than correcting it.^[1] Giving an AI tool source material, such as a specific statute, case file, or template, helps, but it does not solve the problem. A follow-up study by members of the same research team found that even leading legal research tools built on Lexis and Westlaw, which draw on actual legal databases, still produced hallucinated answers between 17 and 33 percent of the time.^[2]

2. Filing and Service

Because Enzo and Mila do not agree on everything, there is no joint petition under G.L. c. 208, § 1A. Enzo files a complaint for divorce under § 1B on his own, and Mila is formally served.

The day she is served, Mila does what Enzo did: she asks a chatbot. Her question is born of fear. Can I secretly record my husband to prove what he acts like behind closed doors? The answer she gets is hedged and unclear. The next morning, she calls a family law attorney.

Her attorney’s first piece of advice is the most valuable one she will receive: do not record anything unless it is open and obvious. What AI failed to disclose: Massachusetts has one of the strictest wiretap laws in the country, and surreptitiously recording a conversation without the knowledge of everyone in it is a crime under G.L. c. 272, § 99. A recording meant to expose Enzo could have incriminated Mila instead.

Meanwhile, Enzo, uneasy about money, moves funds from a joint account into one in his own name. He does not know that the moment he filed for divorce, Supplemental Probate and Family Court Rule 411 bound him to an automatic restraining order, which bound Mila as soon as she was served. Outside narrow exceptions such as reasonable living expenses, neither may transfer assets, change a retirement or insurance beneficiary, or cancel the family’s coverage. Enzo has already crossed a line he never knew existed, one his AI failed to warn him about.

3. The First 45 Days

Within 45 days of service, each spouse must file a sworn Financial Statement under Supplemental Rule 401 and exchange the documents Rule 410 requires, from three years of tax returns to three years of bank and retirement account statements.

Enzo decides to dump his financial documents into his AI, prompting it to fill out his Long-Form Financial Statement. Relying on what the chatbot told him, Enzo provides a Financial Statement that, unbeknownst to him, contains several flaws and inconsistencies. Following the chatbot’s advice that his retirement account is separate property, he leaves it off entirely. Mila’s attorney walks her through her Financial Statement line by line, and carefully fills out the information accurately and credibly.

The difference matters more than either of them realizes. The Financial Statement is signed under the pains and penalties of perjury. Massachusetts does not sort property into tidy piles of “mine” and “yours.” Under G.L. c. 208, § 34, a judge may divide any asset either spouse holds, regardless of whose name is on it, after weighing factors that include the length of the marriage and each spouse’s contributions to the family, expressly including contributions as a homemaker. Enzo’s account was always going to be part of the conversation. Omitting it only delayed the conversation and painted him as not credible to the judge deciding the fate of his divorce.

4. Temporary Orders

Within weeks, Enzo asks the court for temporary orders. His motion, drafted with AI, runs twelve polished pages. It asks for the parenting schedule he imagined at the kitchen table, and it cites a case that, on closer inspection, does not exist.

Mila’s attorney files two focused pages proposing a parenting schedule that keeps both parents meaningfully involved.

The hearing lasts minutes. The judge applies what Massachusetts law provides: absent misconduct, both parents’ rights are equal, and married parents generally share legal custody while a divorce is pending. There is no comparable presumption for the parenting schedule itself; the judge sets it based on the children’s best interests, and the temporary schedule looks far more like Mila’s proposal than Enzo’s. The questions about the missing case, and the unlisted retirement account that surfaced in his tax returns and W-2s, have already begun to shape how the court reads everything Enzo submits.

None of this is a penalty for using technology. It is the ordinary consequence of a single judge deciding how much to trust each party, and of temporary orders that often become the baseline for the rest of the case.

5. Discovery and Court Programs

The middle stretch of the case is slower. Both parents complete the parent education program the court generally requires of parents with minor children. Discovery fills in the financial picture. The court refers the family to mediation.

Through it all, Mila’s attorney keeps returning to the same point: judges consider the history, but they also look toward the future. Mila’s years of caregiving matter, and so do Enzo’s. But the court will focus on what each parent can offer the children from here, how stable each home will be, and whether each parent will support the children’s relationship with the other. A plan built to push a capable parent to the edges of the children’s lives tells a judge something, and rarely what its author intended.

6. Settlement

By the pretrial conference, Enzo’s expectations and the law have drifted far apart. He takes a step that changes the course of his case: he hires an attorney. In one meeting, his new attorney tells him what the chatbot never did.

With both spouses now grounded in reality, the case settles. The agreement provides for a parenting schedule in which both parents remain central to the children’s lives, and it divides the marital estate according to actual Massachusetts law. The judge reviews it, finds it fair and reasonable, and approves it.

Even then, the divorce is not final that day. A judgment of divorce first enters “nisi” and becomes absolute at least ninety days later.

7. The Lesson

Enzo’s experience illustrates the risks of treating AI-generated answers as legal guidance. The chatbot did not determine the outcome of his divorce, but it did cause months of conflict built on false expectations, a credibility problem of his own making, and the expense of undoing both. By reinforcing his assumptions rather than challenging them, AI helped create expectations that were never grounded in Massachusetts Law.

Mila used AI too. The difference is that someone questioned its answers before she acted on them. While AI is advantageous in some ways, it is not a reliable replacement for the judgment and individualized advice of an attorney.

Used thoughtfully, AI can help you organize documents, decode unfamiliar terms, and prepare questions for a lawyer. It cannot exercise judgment: hear the worry beneath your question, know which battles are worth fighting, or stand beside you when the judge asks the follow-up you never saw coming. A chatbot can make a hard moment feel less burdensome. It cannot make it less consequential.

Conclusion

If you are considering divorce, have questions about child custody or property division, or need guidance navigating the Massachusetts family court system, contact Laina Dowd or another member of the Family Law Group at Ligris + Associates PC.

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Enzo and Mila are fictional, and their story is an illustration, not a prediction; every case turns on its own facts. This post is provided for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. For advice about your specific situation, please consult an attorney.

[1] Matthew Dahl, Varun Magesh, Mirac Suzgun & Daniel E. Ho, Large Legal Fictions: Profiling Legal Hallucinations in Large Language Models, 16 J. Legal Analysis 64 (2024).

[2] Varun Magesh, Faiz Surani, Matthew Dahl, Mirac Suzgun, Christopher D. Manning & Daniel E. Ho, Hallucination-Free? Assessing the Reliability of Leading AI Legal Research Tools, 22 J. Empirical Legal Stud. 216 (2025).

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