The Beatles, AI and Divorce

The Beatles, AI and Divorce

Friends ask me “isn’t it goodbye to family lawyers now that we can just Google for the answer.”

Who is to know, but my current take is that it probably shouldn’t be. Provided people are still in the market for making the best of their situation – they may be saying goodbye whilst I say hello.

AI can be a friend to all of us. It is a tool that can enable us to do our work better / faster / cheaper (or catastrophically badly if we are not operating within its limitations). Currently its limitations mean that it is nowhere near good enough to be a replacement for what most people really need and will get from the right professional at a time of divorce or separation.  Sorry if that sounds self-serving but this is the way that I see it.

I have wondered whether Paul McCartney sounded a bit male-centric, when sixty years ago this year, he started to sing:

“Try to see it my way
Only time will tell if I am right or I am wrong
While you see it your way
There’s a chance that we might fall apart before too long”

More recently I have concluded there was greater wisdom in this 23-year-old’s lyrics. He was performing a role: it absolutely is how one might come to dispute resolution:

• With the intention to work things out; but
• With the sense that yes everyone should “see it my way”, and that seeing it your way involves fussing and fighting because you’ve got it wrong and you are still thinking that it’s alright.

If you have relationship issues to solve, there are 4 hard facts to keep front and centre:

1. Law doesn’t have one answer to your problem. What law offers is a set of principles that point to a zone of settlement and they are principles that give quite a pretty wide landing zone. That is unless you spend ruinous amounts of time, effort and money asking a Judge to give you that one answer.
2. What the court would give you is not the “gold-standard” that every family should aim for. You should consider:
   • Our Family Law Judges are very clear that law is no more than the thing that delivers closure when you can’t work it out for yourselves
   • How can a judge who has never met your child know what is best for them?
   • How is a judge, however brilliant, going to work out an answer to the financial predicament faced by your family that is better than the choices you could make for yourselves (before you spent so much money that those choices may now be out of reach anyway)?
3. What you think is best, quite possibly isn’t the best possible answer. If it were, you would have worked it out long ago, got it straight and said goodnight. Remember, the person you are talking to is going to need to feel heard and understood, before they are going to shift. Quite probably the answer is neither yours nor theirs: it is some third way synthesis, using all of the hard work between you as a leaping off point.
4. Working everything out on your own, between the two of you, when things are so tense and so much is at stake, is unlikely to happen: You are going to need someone to help you manage your way to conclusion.

Ultimately this is why I think the right sort of family law professional is going to be around for a while yet. People need someone who:

• can tell you the location of that zone (if you need it)
• can guide you and help you with choices and consequences
• more importantly, can help you both stay listening to each other until you can work it out.