AI Custody Advice: Why Chatbot Legal Strategy Can Wreck Your Divorce Case

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Hello and welcome to this week's show and briefing.
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I am so appreciative that you are here.
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And here's a sentence I never thought I'd say on this show.
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It's been seven, six, five, six years now.
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You might talk yourself out of a good outcome because of a chatbot.
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Not because the tool did anything malicious, because you sat down at 11 at night, exhausted, scared, staring down a decision that's going to affect your kids for years, and you typed your situation into an AI tool.
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And it gave you back a confident, well-written, completely generic answer.
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But that answer felt so authoritative, so put together that you started treating it like it came from your divorce coach or your$500 an hour attorney instead of a piece of software that has never seen your court, never met your acts, and never sat across from your kids.
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So, dads, I've started seeing this more and more in particularly the last year.
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It's become one of the most common phrases I hear from dads I work with.
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Quote, I ran it through AI and it said dot, dot, dot.
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You know, and and then whatever comes next is a strategy, a prediction about how a judge is going to rule a script for a conversation with an ex who has a documented pattern of twisting every word you say.
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So dads dads are showing up, and and I see guys showing up to sessions with pages of it.
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They've already sent a message or made a move based on it before they ever ran it past me, their attorney, or anybody else who actually knows the specific the specifics of their case.
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And look, guys, I get it.
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I understand the impulse.
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You're exhausted, you're scared, you're steering down legal bills that make your stomach drop.
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And here's a tool sitting right there on your phone that will answer any question you have that you ask it instantly for free at three in the morning when uh nobody else is picking up.
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Uh of and so, of course, dads are uh are turning to it.
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But I'd be lying if I told you, and and also I'd be lying if I told you that I don't use AI tools constantly in my own work and building out materials for this show, helping me organize research for for my book.
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This is not, and so this is not an episode where I tell you to throw your phone out and and go back to the card catalogs at the library.
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But what this this episode is about is precision.
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Because here's the thing about AI that most people get that most people, and not just divorced dads, but most people in general get wrong.
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AI is extraordinary at some things, but it's dangerous at others.
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And the line between those two categories is not fuzzy.
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It's actually pretty clean once you know where to look at to look for that line.
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And so my job today, and what I want to convey to you today, is to show you where that line, that line is and have you draw it in permanent marker because on one side of that line, AI is going to save you time, save you money, uh, and make you sharper walking into every conversation about your divorce.
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On the other side of that line, AI is going to hand you a landmine wrapped in confident, articulate, perfect, perfectly punctuated language, and you're going to step on it without even feeling it happen until the damage is already done.
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So, so here's the shape of our of our time together.
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First, we're going to talk about where AI is genuinely one of the best tools you have access to right now.
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Better than it's ever been, better than most divorced dads even realize.
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And specifically around understanding the law in your actual jurisdiction and around getting organized in a situation that has about six million moving parts that are happening all at once.
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Then we're going to get into where the danger zone is, the ways AI will confidently, cheerfully, and disastrously try to tell you what your legal strategy should be.
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And then I'm going to walk you, walk you through exactly why that's a landmine using real dynamics from real high conflict cases.
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So you understand this isn't theoretical.
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And then we're going to close with a practical framework, how you can actually use these tools the right way, starting today, so you walk away from the episode with something you can use instead of just something that you agree with or you're scared about.
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Because we don't need you to be scared about more things.
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We just need you to understand the system and how to work within the system and use tools to maximize your time and anything else to get through this.
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So where AI actually earns its spot on your div on your divorce team.
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And I'll start by giving credit where credit's due because I think a lot of advocacy shows like like mine, like this podcast, and others have a bad habit of treating every new tool as either a miracle cure, right?
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Like like you see on all the social media, or the enemy.
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And AI is neither.
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AI is a tool.
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A hammer is great for driving nails, right?
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But a hammer is terrible for performing precise surgery.
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AI is the same.
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Let's talk about where the hammer actually belongs in your toolbox.
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The first place it belongs is learning the law where you actually live, because family law is not one law.
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And I see and you hear me talk about this constantly, and the guys that are in the group calls or individual coaching hear me talk about it a lot, but it bears repeating because it is the single most misunderstood fact about divorce.
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And not just in the United States, but across the world, because I know we've got a lot of international listeners.
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There's no uh federal family law, at least in the United States.
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And I'm not sure in exactly every country that you're in if that's true or not.
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But in the United States, there is no family, there is no federal family law.
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And what you get on play on sites like Reddit or from your college buddy who went through his divorce in a different state, or maybe a decade ago, or what some influencers with 200,000 followers post about your rights as a father.
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None of that is reliable because family law is set state by state, and in a lot of places, it gets further shaped county by county, judicial district by judicial district, sometimes even judge by judge, based on that judge's courtroom and how they conduct themselves and manage their courtroom.
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This is where a modern AI tool is generally one of the best research assistants you will ever have access to.
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You can sit down right now and ask it in plain English, what is the legal standard for modifying a parenting plan in my state, for instance?
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Uh, you can ask it to uh explain the difference between legal custody and physical custody, the way that your state statute defines those terms, because this trips up so many dads.
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Those terms do not mean the same thing in every state.
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And you can ask it what your state's residency requires requirements are before you can even file.
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You can ask it how your state defines the best interests of the child standard, because that phrase shows up in almost every state's code.
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But the specific factors that judge is require to weigh and how they weigh those under that standard can vary meaningfully from state to state.
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You can go even further.
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You can ask it to explain what a guardian madlitum is and whether your state uses that term or a different one.
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You can ask it how your state treats marital property versus separate property, whether you're in a community property state or an equitable distribution state, which is a distinction that will directly shape how your assets get split, and that almost nobody explains to dads in plain English before they need to know it.
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You can ask it to walk you through what temporary orders are, how long they typically stay in effect in your jurisdiction, what the process looks like to request one.
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And so here's why this matters so much.
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Practically speaking, every hour you spend educating yourself on the basic architecture of your state's family law system before you walk into your attorney's office is an hour or rather hours of billable time you are not paying for later.
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That is why this is incredibly important.
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And I talk about it constantly.
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Your attorney's not a therapist, your attorney's not your researcher, your attorney's not the person who should be explaining to you for the first time at four, five, six hundred dollars an hour what the word custody or parenting time even means in your state.
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That's homework you can and should do on your own time for free before that meeting.
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It's one of the first things in private coaching that I tell dads that they need to do is their first homework in the 90-day day, um, the bulletproof dad 90-day protocol.
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That's the first thing.
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Get up to date and read your statutes.
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And I and AI has made that homework faster and more accessible than it has ever been in the history of family law.
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You used to need a library law card, like the law library card, and not just library card, but to you'd have to go to the law library and a free and a few free afternoons to go and read the statutes to learn and understand them.
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Now you just need a phone and 20 minutes.
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So it's not an immense amount of homework and doesn't take a lot of time to get up to speed on what uh the statutes are.
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And then there's a nuance layer here that I want to make sure you catch also because it's easy to miss.
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AI is particularly good at surfacing the fact that nuance exists in the first place.
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I'll say that again.
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AI is particularly good at surfacing the fact that nuance exists in the first place.
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A lot of dads don't even know what questions to ask because they don't know that their situation has local wrinkles at all.
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You can literally ask an AI tool, what are some things about divorce law in my specific jurisdiction that surprise people who assume all states work the same or all jurisdictions work the same way?
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Uh and it often hands you back a list of exactly the kind of things that trip dads up, waiting periods, residency requirements, how your state treats a parent who wants to relocate, uh, whether your state has a presumption toward equal parenting time or not.
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And that last one, by the way, varies enormously.
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Uh, some states start from a presumption of 50-50, some states don't.
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We need to get to that place, but that's that's a different episode that you've already heard, but we need to keep working on.
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But knowing which kind of state you're in before you walk into your first parenting time or custody conversation changes your entire posture.
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The next is getting organized when your life has fractured into a bunch of different directions all at once.
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And this is the second place NUAI genuinely shines, and it is tremendous.
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I use it myself extensively in my life, and I think this one might actually be more valuable than the legal research, even though it gets talked about less.
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When you're in the middle of a high conflict divorce, you are not managing one problem.
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You're managing at minimum five or six, seven, eight problem challenges, I'll call them, simultaneously.
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Uh, and they're all urgent and they're all tangled together.
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You've got the legal case itself, filings, deadlines, discovery requests, hearing dates.
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You've got the beginning of a co-parenting or parallel parenting relationship with someone you may not currently be able to have a one-minute conversation with or phone call with without it turning into a fight.
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You've got your finances being completely restructured in real time, figuring out what support looks like, what happens to the house, how you're going to afford two households on income that used to fund one.
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You've got your kids who are watching all of this and need you steady even when you don't feel steady.
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And underneath all of it, you've probably got your own physical and mental health, which is usually the first thing that gets neglected because it's the only item on the list that doesn't have a deadline attached to it until it does.
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This is where AI used correctly becomes something like a chief of staff for your life.
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That's the best way that I could come up with a description of it.
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It becomes the chief of staff.
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It can be it can become something like a chief of staff.
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Let's not make it the chief of staff of your life, okay?
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But it can help you in being like a chief of staff for your life.
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But not a strategist, uh, a chief of staff.
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There's a difference, and we're going to spend the whole second part of this episode on that difference.
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But for right now, let's talk about what a chief of staff actually does.
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You can what it does is it can take a wall of confusing, or you can take a wall of confusing emotionally loaded text messages from your ex and ask an AI tool to help you organize them chronologically by topic, communication about the kids' schedule in one bucket, communication about finances in another, uh, anything touching on missed exchanges or violations of the parenting plan in a third.
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You're not asking it to tell you what any of it means legally.
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You're asking it to help you take chaos, all of this information, and turn it into a structure you can actually hand to your attorney or your divorce coach without burying them in 300 unsorted screenshots, which is going to cost you thousands of dollars to have them unravel for you.
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So you can you can also use it to build yourself, and I highly recommend this build yourself a master calendar, court dates, filing deadlines, mediation sessions, kids' school events, therapy appointments, all of it.
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Cross-reference against maybe your proposed parenting schedule so you can actually see where conflicts are going to happen before they happen.
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We do this a lot when we're when we're preparing and in individual coaching, preparing a parenting, parenting plan proposal.
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And we and I have the the dads do this and put all this together so that they can actually look at what would be the best proposed parenting time schedule.
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And then you can use it to draft the rough first pass at a budget also that accounts for two households instead of one, so that when you sit down with your financial professional, you're not starting from a blank page, you're starting from a draft they can refine, which again saves you money on professional time, right?
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These professionals are all going to charge you money.
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They all have to make a living, so I understand that, but but it can get very expensive very fast.
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The other thing you can use it for, and I want to be really specific here because this one has real value.
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And I want you to think, help you think through how to phrase a or what it can do is it can, and I, and I, and I've and I and I really like it for this.
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It can help you think through how to phrase a difficult co-parenting communication before you send it.
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Now, before AI, it was, you know, my recommendation was send it to your, you know, send it to your buddy, wait 24 hours, send it to your Fernie first, talk to me, whatever.
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Now it's a lot easier to, you know, and it's not to write your legal strategy into a text message.
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We'll get to why that's dangerous later, but to help you just take a simple message you've drafted, however, you may have drafted in whatever emotional state you're in at like 11 at night, and ask, can you help me say this in a way that's calm, factual, uh, and won't give her attorney anything to use against me, right?
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Gray Rock or or BIF, brief and formus, friendly, but firm.
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So you can just ask it to do those things.
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And this is an enormously practical use of the technology.
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It's essentially a first pass editor on call 24 hours a day.
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You know, I'm pretty uh accessible, guys.
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I'm not going to respond to your text at you know 11:30 at 11, 11:30 at night.
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I'm usually way, way sound asleep by then.
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But you know, you've got you've got that first pass editor there 24 hours a day that has no emotional stake in your marriage and won't take your bait when you're spiraling emotionally.
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So let me give you one more example of this because I think it's the one that surprises dads the most when I bring it up.
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A lot of guys going through this are also, for the first time in their adult lives, having to think seriously about their own finances independent of a shared household.
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Retirement accounts, whether that's there's a pension involved, whether a business you own or co-own is going to get treated as marital property, what happens to a mortgage that's currently in both names.
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You can ask an AI tool to explain in plain language what a quadro is.
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The quadro is a qualified domestic relations order, the specific court order required to divide a retirement account in divorce.
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You can ask it that, and you can do this before you ever sit down with a financial professional.
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And again, have to have a 15-minute conversation about how that works with them.
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And you already know.
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You can ask it to explain the difference between a community property state and an equitable distribution state and what that distinction is actually going to mean for how your specific assets get split.
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However, none of that replaces a certified divorce financial analyst.
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But again, walking into that first meeting and actually ongoing, understanding the vocabulary means every dollar you spend with that professional goes towards your specific numbers and the work that you need towards your case instead of towards a vocabulary lesson or a remedial lesson on some of this stuff.
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And I know it's remedial to you, but this is a tool that helps you to save money in doing that.
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So the same thing goes for the co-parenting piece.
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You can ask an AI tool to explain the difference between legal custody and physical custody or what parallel parenting means versus cooperative co-parenting.
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You can ask to explain what a parent parenting coordinator, a PC does, and whether your state uses that role or a different one.
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Again, none of this tells you what to do in your specific case.
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If you're if you're tracking with this, right?
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All of it make all all of it makes you a more literate, more prepared participant in the process, which frankly, most court systems are not designed to make it easy for the average person walking in cold.
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Again, remember, this this family court is created by attorneys, adjudicated by attorneys, and it is not user-friendly for the average person.
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So that's my case for AI.
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Genuinely useful for legal literacy specific to your geography.
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Genuinely useful as an organizational engine for a situation that has way too many moving parts for any human being to hold entirely in their head.
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And if we stop the episode here, I tell you use this tool, use it often, and you walk into every professional conversation, whether it's an attorney, CDFA, CPA, therapist, every conversation is sharper and more prepared than 90% of the dads going through this without it.
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But I don't want to stop here because there is a landmine sitting right next to all of that value, uh, and it's disguised to look exactly like more of the same helpful, confident, well-organized advice.
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And I'm going to show you exactly where that line mine is buried and why it's so easy to step on without ever feeling the click.
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Here we go.
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If you ask an AI tool to write you a strategy for winning a 50-50 custody agreement or equal shared parenting time, it would give you one confidently, fluently, in beautifully organized bullet points, probably with a heading that says something like, quote your path forward.
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And that strategy would sound completely plausible.
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It might even contain some accurate general information buried inside of it.
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And it would be for your specific case in your specific courtroom in front of your specific judge against your specific ex, it would very possibly be useless at best.
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And actively harmful at worst.
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I'm going to say that again.
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You don't trust the robots, don't trust modern technology, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
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I want you to understand the actual mechanism of why this fails so you can recognize it in real time when it's happening to you or to a buddy of yours going through this.
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AI has no idea what actually happens in your courtroom.
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Family court is not a rule book.
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I've said this on the show before, and I'll say it again because it's the single most important structural fact about this entire system.
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Family court runs on distract the discretion.
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Family court runs on discretion.
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The statutes give a judge a framework.
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Best interest of the child.
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This lists factors to weigh, but inside that framework, an enormous amount of what happens is shaped by that individual judge's temperament, that judges his biases, that judges his pet issues, that judges history with your attorney or with opposing counsel.
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Even what mood that courtroom is in that particular Tuesday after they've already heard four contentious hearings before yours.
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Even maybe how you parch your hair.
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And it cannot know your judge.
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It has no access to how how Judge Martinez in your county tends to rule on relocation requests versus how a judge two counties over rules on the same fact pattern.
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It doesn't know that your specific court has an unwritten preference for keeping siblings together in scheduling, or that your specific court leans hard towards whoever currently has status quo possession of the kids, or that opposing counsel in your case has a documented pattern with this particular judge of overplaying allegations, and that your attorney knows exactly how to use that pattern against her in cross-examination.
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This is not information that exists in a training data set.
00:25:46.700 --> 00:26:20.220
This is local knowledge, the kind of knowledge that lives in the heads of divorce coaches, attorneys, you know, other professionals that are part of your locality who have stood in front of that specific judge or have been in that uh specific family court system dozens or hundreds of times, who may know the clerk who may know the clerk, who know which motions that that judge grants routinely and which ones that judge might be skeptical skeptical of.
00:26:20.619 --> 00:26:25.099
That knowledge is not written down anywhere for an AI tool to learn from.
00:26:25.259 --> 00:26:39.420
It is earned through years of uh local practice and also learning how to discover that information by asking questions and working with a coach to figure out how to do that.
00:26:39.579 --> 00:26:57.339
And so when you ask an AI tool for strategy, it is generating a statistically plausible sounding answer based on general patterns and family law writ large, not an answer calibrated to the one courtroom that actually determines your outcome.
00:26:57.500 --> 00:27:00.940
And I'm gonna give you a really specific uh example of this.
00:27:01.099 --> 00:27:23.259
One of the other things I recommend to guys when we're in the middle of this process is to go and sit in the courtroom of your judge, or at least in the in the family courts of your jurisdiction, so that you can get a feel of the court, but more specifically, an idea of how your specific judge operates.
00:27:23.500 --> 00:27:26.940
So an AI tool has no idea around that.
00:27:27.180 --> 00:27:32.539
And an AI tool also has no idea who your ex actually is.
00:27:32.779 --> 00:27:39.180
This is the one I want to spend some real time on because uh I think it's the place dads underestimate the most.
00:27:39.339 --> 00:27:47.420
If you've been listening to show, you know I talk a lot about high conflict dynamics, about what I call the silver bullet.
00:27:47.980 --> 00:28:07.740
The coordinated and in in just as if you guys don't know, this the coordinate the silver bullet is the coordinated combination of false allegations, smear campaigns, and surveillance that a genuinely high conflict co-parent will deploy, often all at once, escalating over months or years.
00:28:08.059 --> 00:28:21.900
If your ex is operating from that kind of playbook or from a personality uh pattern that produces that kind of playbook, and we talk about this in coaching too, the red flags for whether or not your case is going to escalate.
00:28:22.059 --> 00:28:39.740
And I'm talking about the kind of manipulation and lack of empathy that shows up in certain personality disorders, which forensic evaluators actually have standardized tools to detect, then generic strategic advice is not just unhelpful, it can be dangerous.
00:28:40.059 --> 00:28:42.859
And here's a here's another concrete example.
00:28:43.099 --> 00:28:54.220
Generic advice, the kind an AI tool will hand you, might tell you that de-escalation and cooperative communication is the best approach in a custody dispute.
00:28:54.460 --> 00:28:55.339
Okay, great.
00:28:55.500 --> 00:29:01.900
And in a healthy co-parenting situation, or even a moderately conflicted one, that's often true.
00:29:02.220 --> 00:29:04.460
Cooperation reads well to courts.
00:29:04.619 --> 00:29:06.460
It's usually the right instinct.
00:29:06.700 --> 00:29:28.379
But if your ex is running a genuine, high conflict playbook, unconditional cooperation without documentation, without boundaries, without a strategy built around her specific behavioral patterns can get read by that same court as weakness, or worse, can get exploited directly.
00:29:28.539 --> 00:29:35.900
And I just had a conversation with a with a guy on a consult this way, this week, who had a silver bullet.
00:29:36.619 --> 00:29:47.339
He was able to overcome those, but he's sitting and he's waiting until January to go back to court to deal with the fact that he doesn't have his kids except supervised and got kicked out of his home, right?
00:29:47.420 --> 00:29:50.539
That is not a strategy that is conceding.
00:29:50.619 --> 00:30:01.500
Uh, and a high conflict parent who knows you'll always show up accommodating, always avoid conflict, always try to smooth things over, will use that predictability against you.
00:30:01.660 --> 00:30:05.019
She'll push boundaries because she knows you won't hold the line.
00:30:05.180 --> 00:30:11.259
She'll escalate because she knows you'll de-escalate every single time and absorb the cost yourself.
00:30:11.500 --> 00:30:16.779
The right strategy for that specific dynamic is not generic, be cooperative advice.
00:30:16.940 --> 00:30:36.700
It's something much more precise, knowing when to hold the boundary, even when it creates short-term friction, knowing how to document a pattern without escalating it yourself, knowing when gray rock communication is the right tool and when it's actually the wrong tool, because it will be read as stonewalling to a judge who doesn't yet understand the full pattern.
00:30:36.859 --> 00:30:47.579
That is a judgment call that requires understanding your ex as a specific human being with a specific history and specific behavioral patterns.
00:30:47.819 --> 00:30:51.420
An AI tool has never spoken to your ex.
00:30:51.660 --> 00:30:55.579
It has never read a single one of her texts unless you feed them to it.
00:30:55.740 --> 00:31:13.900
And even then, it's pattern matching against generic training data, not against the accumulated red, the accumulated read that your divorce coach, your therapist, or your attorney builds over months of watching her actually, her actual behavior play out in real time.
00:31:15.099 --> 00:31:19.980
AI also does not know how to manage your attorney relationship.
00:31:20.139 --> 00:31:22.700
Here's another, this is another blind spot, dads.
00:31:23.019 --> 00:31:27.579
And this one's a little different because it's less about your ex and more about your own team.
00:31:27.819 --> 00:31:36.940
A huge amount of what makes a divorce case go well or go badly comes down to the working relationship between you and your attorney.
00:31:37.259 --> 00:31:40.779
And you hear me talk about being the coach of your divorce team.
00:31:41.019 --> 00:31:43.819
So how you brief your attorney is important.
00:31:44.059 --> 00:31:47.900
When you push back on your advice and when you defer to it is important.
00:31:48.139 --> 00:31:57.180
How you manage the retainer and the runway on your legal budget so you don't run out of funding two-thirds of the way through your case is important.
00:31:57.819 --> 00:32:00.059
Your attorney's not going to talk to you about that.
00:32:00.220 --> 00:32:04.779
When it's the right moment to file an aggressive motion, and AI is not going to talk to you about that either.
00:32:05.019 --> 00:32:17.259
When it's the right moment to file an aggressive motion, and when filing that same motion is going to read to the judge as you being the difficult litigious one, which by the way matters enormously, right?
00:32:17.420 --> 00:32:18.700
Because we talked about it before.
00:32:18.779 --> 00:32:32.220
You hear me talk about creating that narrative that that the preponderance of the evidence, uh, because judges remember which party seems reasonable and which party seems combative.
00:32:32.299 --> 00:32:38.779
And that impression bleeds into everything else in the case case, whether it's supposed to or not.
00:32:39.660 --> 00:32:44.460
An AI tool cannot tell you this because it does not know your attorney.
00:32:44.619 --> 00:32:55.339
It does not know if your attorney is aggressive by nature and needs you to occasionally rein them in, or conservative by nature and needs you to occasionally push them harder.
00:32:55.500 --> 00:33:07.259
This is one of the things we talk about in individual coaching also one-on-one, is uh if you've come to me before you've chosen your attorney, we decide, you know, how to go about it and how to interview them and talk about which one to select.
00:33:07.420 --> 00:33:14.619
If you've already got one, we talk about what the best way is to work with that attorney based upon how they're showing up and how they're performing.
00:33:14.779 --> 00:33:16.940
So AI has no idea about that.
00:33:17.019 --> 00:33:18.460
It has a huge impact.
00:33:18.619 --> 00:33:25.019
Your attorney is the person there to be able to adjudicate your case on your behalf, right?
00:33:25.180 --> 00:33:35.819
It doesn't know your attorney's relationship also with the judge or with opposing counsel or their read on how this particular case is trending.
00:33:35.980 --> 00:33:37.579
That's another thing we talk about.
00:33:37.740 --> 00:33:45.819
And it sometimes we triage directly with attorneys to try to understand the landscape of the particular courtroom that that they're in.
00:33:45.900 --> 00:33:55.740
But at the very least, I'm able to help dads to ask their attorneys to get feedback from what is a good idea with this judge or not with this judge, or in general.
00:33:55.819 --> 00:34:04.379
Like we we strategize with them, with the dad being the coach, but asking the questions from their their very important position player.
00:34:04.460 --> 00:34:10.539
It's like a coach asking their quarterback what feedback they're seeing on the field because they're not on the field.
00:34:10.700 --> 00:34:14.460
The the quarterback's on the field seeing what's happening with the defenses, right?
00:34:14.539 --> 00:34:17.820
It's the same thing in the the the attorney relationship.
00:34:17.980 --> 00:34:22.940
You're gonna ask questions, you're gonna get feedback, and then you're gonna determine what the game plan is.
00:34:23.740 --> 00:34:30.059
When dads come to me with a with these AI generated strategies, I tell them, I tell you exactly.
00:34:30.619 --> 00:34:31.660
Let's try this again.
00:34:31.820 --> 00:34:37.820
When dads come to me with an AI generated strategy, I'll tell you exactly what happens.
00:34:38.700 --> 00:34:39.740
Best case.
00:34:40.139 --> 00:34:45.260
I politely explain why that plan doesn't fit the actual case.
00:34:45.660 --> 00:34:55.099
And I want to be, I want to be, I want to be I want you to understand that it's it not that it doesn't fit with like the legal framework of what we're talking about.
00:34:55.179 --> 00:34:57.259
It does not fit as a strategy.
00:34:57.339 --> 00:35:01.339
Again, and I'm gonna I'm gonna clearly define this for you coming up here.
00:35:01.579 --> 00:35:06.139
And and and because I don't want you to burn 20 minutes of time walking through it.
00:35:06.379 --> 00:35:21.099
But the other thing I might say is worst case, uh I or your attorney starts to see you as a client who's going to start like running everything through eye and second guessing every professional judgment with something you printed off an app.
00:35:21.259 --> 00:35:29.019
And that erodes trust in a relationship where trust is one of the most valuable assets you have, particularly with your attorney.
00:35:29.179 --> 00:35:35.819
The attorney needs to trust you, and you need to trust them to be able to advocate on your behalf.
00:35:36.779 --> 00:35:45.739
Also, AI does not know how to mitigate the hundreds, even thousands of small circumstances that make your case yours.
00:35:46.139 --> 00:35:49.980
This is really the summary point underneath everything I've just said.
00:35:50.219 --> 00:36:00.139
Every high conflict case is built out of an enormous number of small, specific circumstances that never show up in a general prompt.
00:36:00.539 --> 00:36:29.420
The fact that your ex's mother is heavily involved and has her own agenda, the fact that your daughter's therapist has a particular relationship with your ex that colors how she reports things, the fact that you have a work travel schedule that complicates a standard parenting plan, the fact that opposing counsel has a reputation in your local bar for a specific, specific kind of aggressive tactic that's your own attorney knows how to counter because they've seen it, you know, five times already in court.
00:36:29.579 --> 00:36:31.099
None of that is in the prompt.
00:36:31.179 --> 00:36:50.059
None of that can be in the prompt because a lot of it you don't even consciously know matters until someone with real experience in this specific arena points it out to you or has you ask the questions to or has you go and do the research or work to figure it out and learn that.
00:36:50.219 --> 00:36:52.780
And that's what the expertise actually is.
00:36:53.340 --> 00:37:05.739
Not the ability to answer a general question well, but the ability to recognize which of a hundred or thousand small details in front of you is actually the one that changes everything.
00:37:05.900 --> 00:37:10.780
I had a guy in the community said I had 150 pages I brought to court.
00:37:10.860 --> 00:37:12.059
He was pro se.
00:37:12.460 --> 00:37:15.099
And it's like, yeah, that's why you lost, right?
00:37:15.179 --> 00:37:16.619
Like that doesn't help.
00:37:16.860 --> 00:37:23.019
AI right now, at the point we're at with this technology, cannot do that for your specific case.
00:37:23.099 --> 00:37:34.219
It cannot find the specifics, it can only respond to what you tell it, and it has no way of knowing what you're telling it because you don't know it matters yet.
00:37:34.860 --> 00:37:42.380
The other thing is AI will confidently make things up and it will sound exactly as confident as when it's right.
00:37:42.539 --> 00:37:47.500
And I want to add a layer to this that's a little more technical, but it matters enormously.
00:37:47.579 --> 00:37:56.940
And it's probably the single most concrete danger in this entire episode because it's not even about judgment or nuance, it's about basic factual accuracy.
00:37:57.179 --> 00:38:05.340
AI tools have a well-documented tendency to generate information that sounds completely authoritative and it's simply wrong.
00:38:05.579 --> 00:38:11.259
I see this all the time just in regular, everyday general inquiries into it.
00:38:11.420 --> 00:38:14.619
But in legal context specifically, this has a name.
00:38:14.780 --> 00:38:21.420
It's often called hallucination, and it has already caused real documented problems in real courtrooms.
00:38:21.579 --> 00:38:44.300
There have been, you've probably seen this on the news over the past couple of years, where attorneys, actual licensed attorneys, which is crazy, not just self-represented parties, filed brief citings, brief citing court cases that an AI tool had generated that sounded completely real with real-sounding case names and real-sounding citations that did not actually exist.
00:38:45.019 --> 00:38:59.659
The cases were fabricated, they were hallucinated by AI, and completely invented out of whole cloth by a tool that was designed to produce fluent, confident sound sounding text, not to guarantee factual accuracy.
00:38:59.739 --> 00:39:09.820
And the judges caught this and they sanctioned some of these people and got and these people got in really bad, really, you know, really bad trouble.
00:39:09.980 --> 00:39:15.820
And that was with trained attorneys who at least knew, in theory, you think, what to look for, right?
00:39:16.059 --> 00:39:18.059
Now, think about what that means for you, though.
00:39:18.219 --> 00:39:27.659
A dad with no legal training, asking an AI tool a specific question about a statute in your state, uh, or asking it what precedent applies to your custody situation.
00:39:27.820 --> 00:39:29.739
It might give you the correct statute number.
00:39:29.820 --> 00:39:39.340
It might also give you a statute number that sounds correct, formatted exactly like a real one, that is either outdated, misapplied, or entirely fabricated.
00:39:39.500 --> 00:39:50.139
And you have no way of knowing the difference just by reading it because it's going to be written with exactly the same confident, authoritative tone, whether it's right or completely wrong.
00:39:50.380 --> 00:39:54.460
There's no, there's no little warning light that goes off.
00:39:54.619 --> 00:39:58.699
The wrong answer looks identical to the to the right answer.
00:39:58.940 --> 00:40:05.500
And this is exactly why the lawn, the line I drew earlier matters so much.
00:40:05.820 --> 00:40:10.780
Use it to learn general concepts and general vocabulary.
00:40:10.940 --> 00:40:19.340
That's low risk because even if a detail is slightly off, you're not filing anything based on it, you're building context.
00:40:19.659 --> 00:40:41.099
The moment you take anything specific, a statute number, a case citation, a claimed legal standard, and treat it as fact without a licensed professional in your state confirming it, you're gambling with your case on a tool that has no mechanism for knowing the difference between confidently correct and confidently wrong.
00:40:41.259 --> 00:40:51.579
And this is especially important because there's a huge proliferation of these pro se advisors and AI advisors for your cases.
00:40:51.659 --> 00:40:55.579
And I see and I get people contacting me regularly.
00:40:55.739 --> 00:40:59.259
Hey, try out this bot and what do you think of this and that, et cetera?
00:40:59.340 --> 00:41:09.019
And you're gonna have to be really, really careful as some of this stuff proliferates, especially on social media, because look, there's no accountability to any of it or any of them.
00:41:09.099 --> 00:41:19.739
Like there is a semblance of accountability, at least in the sense that they have to answer to you that an attorney or a divorce coach, a CDFA, accountant, anybody else has.
00:41:19.900 --> 00:41:21.820
So just be very careful.
00:41:22.460 --> 00:41:24.780
Because the AI is going to tell you what you want to hear.
00:41:24.860 --> 00:41:29.900
Uh, and in a high conflict divorce, that can be absolutely poisonous.
00:41:30.300 --> 00:41:38.139
And this is the psychological damage I want, the psychological dynamic I want to flag because it's subtle and it compounds over time.
00:41:38.460 --> 00:41:48.300
These tools are generally built, whether by explicit design or by a byproduct of how they're being trained, to be agreeable, to validate the framing you bring to them.
00:41:48.460 --> 00:41:59.340
And this is important, Dads, uh, because I get a lot of guys that are like using this as for conversation to get, you know, the empathy that they they want around this.
00:41:59.420 --> 00:42:14.139
If you go to an AI tool at midnight, furious, and you describe a fight with your ex in a way that paints you as entirely reasonable and her as entirely unreasonable, which by the way is a completely normal and human thing to do when you're hurt and angry.
00:42:14.300 --> 00:42:19.579
The tool is going to largely accept your framing and build its response on top of it.
00:42:19.739 --> 00:42:23.739
It's not going to push back and say, Are you sure that's the whole story?
00:42:23.980 --> 00:42:24.940
Tell me more.
00:42:25.179 --> 00:42:27.420
What might she say happened here?
00:42:27.579 --> 00:42:31.179
It doesn't have a relationship with either of you to draw on.
00:42:31.259 --> 00:42:43.019
And it's optimized to be helpful and responsive to what you're giving it, not to be the person in your life who tells you the hard truth, like a divorce coach, you do not want to hear.
00:42:43.340 --> 00:42:45.179
That might sound harmless.
00:42:45.420 --> 00:42:47.179
It is not harmless, dads.
00:42:47.340 --> 00:42:56.940
One of the most important things a good divorce coach and a good therapist or a good attorney does for you in this process is occasionally tell you something you don't want to hear.
00:42:57.099 --> 00:43:13.340
That a text you sent was more aggressive than you realized in the moment, or that a pattern you're describing as her being crazy might read to a neutral evaluator as just two people, two hurt people escalating each other in their relational dynamic.
00:43:13.659 --> 00:43:21.259
That the story you're telling yourself about being the reasonable one and every interaction might not survive contact with a transcript.
00:43:21.340 --> 00:43:25.420
Uh, that kind of honest friction is uncomfortable.
00:43:25.500 --> 00:43:36.619
I understand, but it is also frequently the exact thing that keeps a dad from making a huge, costly mistake in the heat of the moment.
00:43:36.860 --> 00:43:47.820
And I, an AI tool used as a constant companion during the emotional, emotionally hardest moments of this process can quietly become an echo chamber.
00:43:48.059 --> 00:43:49.820
Every angry 3 a.m.
00:43:50.059 --> 00:43:54.460
message you draft, it'll help you make more articulate.
00:43:54.699 --> 00:44:00.300
Every grievance you bring to it, it'll help you organize and validate.
00:44:00.699 --> 00:44:12.219
Over months, that can actually harden your own certainty about a version of events that a judge, a mediator, or your own attorney is going to see very differently.
00:44:12.460 --> 00:44:17.420
That's not a flaw you'll necessarily notice happening to you in real time.
00:44:17.500 --> 00:44:23.900
It's the kind of thing, and this is the danger with social media and these and these AI chatbots and stuff now.
00:44:24.059 --> 00:44:39.659
It's the kind of thing that shows up six months later when your attorney reads a stack of communication and asks with concern, why does every message sound like you're building a legal case instead of talk instead of talking to your co-parent?
00:44:39.820 --> 00:44:40.699
And that can happen.
00:44:40.780 --> 00:44:42.380
I've actually seen it, right?
00:44:42.780 --> 00:44:47.980
So what you type into that box might not might not stay private.
00:44:48.300 --> 00:44:51.820
And and that this is the next thing I want to bring up.
00:44:52.059 --> 00:44:57.820
And in dis and in discovery, that can matter, just like your emails and your text messages.
00:44:57.980 --> 00:45:08.219
One more danger, and this one's purely practical, and with no psychology involved, everything you type into a consumer AI tool is data.
00:45:08.460 --> 00:45:21.659
And depending on that specific tool and that specific step specific tool settings and a specific company's policies, all of which change constantly, and which almost nobody reads closely, that data may be stored.
00:45:21.900 --> 00:45:34.059
It may be used to improve the underlying model and in some circumstances may be discoverable, meaning it could theoretically be obtained through the legal discovery process in litigation.
00:45:34.219 --> 00:45:34.699
The same way.
00:45:35.340 --> 00:45:38.539
Your text messages or emails can be obtained.
00:45:38.780 --> 00:45:47.259
And now I'm not a technologist, and I'm not going to tell you exactly how any specific company handles this because it changes.
00:45:47.420 --> 00:45:57.659
I do know how it imp it works in my circumstances and the privacy and protections that I've got in place to protect myself and my clients while using this.
00:45:57.900 --> 00:46:05.500
But you should look up the current privacy policy of whatever specific tool you're using before you type anything sensitive in it.
00:46:05.739 --> 00:46:19.259
I want you thinking about this the same way I want you thinking about texting your buddy about your case or posting anything about your divorce on social media, which I've hammered guys about on this show and in private as well.
00:46:19.500 --> 00:46:26.940
Anything you put in writing anywhere has some chance of resurfacing later in a context you did not intend.
00:46:27.099 --> 00:46:37.820
If you wouldn't want opposing counsel reading it out loud in a hearing, and this is my standard all of the time for dads, be thoughtful about where you're typing it in the first place.
00:46:37.900 --> 00:46:45.099
And that includes an AI chat window, not just a text thread with one of your family members.
00:46:45.739 --> 00:47:01.259
Practically, this means use these tools freely for general legal education, for general organizational tasks that do not require you to paste in identifying details.
00:47:01.579 --> 00:47:17.659
When you do want help organizing something specific, actual text shreds, actual financial details, actual allegations, understand that you're creating a record the same as you would be creating a record anywhere else and act accordingly.
00:47:20.460 --> 00:47:25.420
Here's one here's so here's the last thing with AI.
00:47:25.579 --> 00:47:27.900
There is no silver bullet.
00:47:28.219 --> 00:47:31.659
And anything that promises you one is the tell.
00:47:31.900 --> 00:47:42.380
And so I say constantly on the show because it applies in this circumstance more than almost anywhere else, there's no guarantee in family court.
00:47:42.539 --> 00:47:53.259
Not one document, not one motion, not one clever argument, not one piece of advice generated in 30 seconds that is going to hand you the outcome you want.
00:47:53.739 --> 00:48:08.780
Anybody or anything that hands you a confident, complete, tidy strategy without knowing your judge, your ex, your attorney, and the thousands of small circumstances underneath your case, that confidence is the red flag, not the reassurance.
00:48:09.019 --> 00:48:12.460
Real strategy in a high conflict case is messy.
00:48:12.619 --> 00:48:14.059
It's contingent.
00:48:14.219 --> 00:48:17.980
It changes based upon what the other side does next.
00:48:18.139 --> 00:48:24.300
It requires a human being with actual context to make judgment calls in real time.
00:48:24.460 --> 00:48:33.820
If something hands you a strategy that sounds too clean, too complete, too confident, that's exactly the moment to slow down, not speed up.
00:48:34.300 --> 00:48:59.659
So this is, you know, this is something I have conversations with dads about all the time because I do the strategic risk consults, and in 30, 45 minutes, guys want, you know, to know how to take the rest of their nine months of their case, which is impossible to do with me, who's been doing this for 13, you know, has been in family court for 13 years now.
00:48:59.980 --> 00:49:03.019
Imagine an AI buy could never ever do this.
00:49:03.179 --> 00:49:07.179
They're not ever going to be able to do this, basically, is what it comes down to.
00:49:07.340 --> 00:49:09.980
But we can't do this in 30, 45 minutes.
00:49:10.139 --> 00:49:21.900
We have to do this over, you know, best case scenario, nine months is about average in a scenario that goes really, really well in a high conflict divorce where things really fall in line really, really well.
00:49:21.980 --> 00:49:26.940
So an A bot's never ever going to be able to do this in a two-minute prompt.
00:49:27.099 --> 00:49:35.179
So let's bring this together in something practical because I don't want you walking away from the episode just knowing what not to do.
00:49:35.340 --> 00:49:39.019
I want you to know exactly what to do starting today.
00:49:39.179 --> 00:49:42.699
Here's the line: stated as simply as I can state it.
00:49:42.940 --> 00:49:45.340
Use AI to learn.
00:49:45.659 --> 00:49:48.059
Use AI to organize.
00:49:48.539 --> 00:49:51.980
Never ever use AI to decide.
00:49:52.139 --> 00:49:53.420
I'll say that again.
00:49:53.739 --> 00:50:00.139
Use AI to learn, use AI to organize, never use AI to decide.
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Learning means understanding your state's laws, understanding terminology, understanding what questions you don't yet know to ask.
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That's research.
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AI is excellent at that, and you should be using it constantly for that purpose for free on your own time before every single conversation with any one of your paid professionals.
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Organizing means taking the chaos of a fractured high conflict situation and turning it into structure, timelines, document organization, calendars, budgets, first drafts of difficult communications.
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AI is excellent at that too.
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It is functionally the best low-cost chief of staff you will ever have access to during this period of life.
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Deciding means what motion to file, when to file it, how to interpret your acts of specific behavioral pattern, how to time a difficult conversation, whether to push back on your attorney's advice or trust it, how to read your specific judge, how to respond to a specific act of manipulation from a specific person who knows exactly which buttons of yours to push.
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That is not a research question.
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That is a judgment call made by human beings with actual context.
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Your attorney, your divorce coach, a therapist who understands high conflict dynamics, a financial professional who can model your actual numbers.
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Those are the people who sit in the driver's seat on strategy.
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AI rides in the backseat, handing out maps and notes.
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It does not touch the wheel.
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Here's a practical test you can run anytime you're about to act on something an AI tool told you.
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Ask yourself this one question.
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Does acting on this require knowing something about my specific judge, my specific ex, or my specific case history that this tool has no way of actually knowing?
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If the answer is yes, and for anything touching on strategy, the answer is almost always yes.
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That's your signal to take it to a human professional before you act on it, not after.
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So let me walk you through what this actually looks like in practice with a few worked examples because I think the abstract version of this advice is easy to nod along to and yeah, agree with.
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Then forget the first time you're actually in the moment.
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Example one, your ex texts you that she's changing pickup time this weekend without asking, and you're furious.
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You open an AI tool and ask, is this a violation of my parenting plan?
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And what should I do about it?
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Here's the split.
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Asking it to help you reread the actual language of your parenting plan and explain what it says about the scheduling changes.
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That's learning.
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That's fair game.
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Go ahead.
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Asking it whether the specific incident is specific is significant enough to bring to you your attorney's attention or whether this is the kind of thing worth documenting as part of a pattern versus letting go as a one-off or filing a motion for contempt or firing back a sharp text right now, serves you or hurts you.
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That's a judgment call about your specific situation and your specific ex's patterns.
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And that's a conversation for your coach or your attorney, even it's just a two-line message to them instead of a 50-minute session.
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So that's example one.
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Example two, you're preparing for a mediation session next week and you want to walk in sharp, ready to go.
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Asking an AI tool to explain what mediation typically looks like, what a mediator's role is versus a judge's role, what kinds of things typically do and don't get resolved in mediation in general, that is learning.
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And it'll make you a more informed participant.
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Asking it to draft your actual negotiating position, and I've had this happen before, that's why I bring it up.
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Tell you what number to open with on child support or predict how your ex is going to respond based on the description you've given it, that is strategy built on a description only provided, filtered through no actual knowledge of your acts, and that belongs in a conversation with your attorney or your divorce coach before you walk into that room.
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Example three, and this one's important, you get served with emotion you don't understand.
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And your first instinct at whatever, 10 o'clock at night, with panic sitting in, is to paste the whole thing into an AI tool and ask what it means and what you should file back.
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Asking it to translate the legal jargon into plain English so you're not sitting there panicked over words you don't recognize, completely reasonable.
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And it and it probably hopefully and it should calm you down enough to function.
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Asking it to draft your actual response, tell you what defense to raise, or tell you whether this motion is real, a real threat, or nothing, or just nothing to worry about, that is exactly the landmine this entire episode has been about.
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Because that response requires knowing your court, your judges' tendencies, the credibility of the person who filed it, and 12 other things a general purpose tool sitting on your cell phone has no access to.
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That's a phone call to your coach or your attorney first thing in the morning.
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Even if it costs you for an emergency consult, it's much cheaper than the alternative reaction.
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So, Dads, notice the pattern across all three of these examples.
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Understanding, translating, calming down, organizing, green light, deciding, predicting, drafting your actual position, evaluating threat level, red light, handed to a human.
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That's the whole framework.
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It's not complicated.
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It just requires you to catch yourself in the moment, which takes practice, which is exactly why I'm giving this as homework instead of just something to think about.
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But before I get to this homework, let me tell you about well, you know, I'm not gonna, we're going long.
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I'm not gonna give this example.
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Let's just jump to jump to the homework.
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And and and so here it is.
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First, tonight, sit down with an AI tool and spend 20 minutes learning the actual architecture of your state's family law.
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Ask it to explain custody terminology in your state, your state's property division rules, and what temporary orders look like where you live.
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Write down what you learn, bring it to your next conversation with your coach or your attorney, not as a strategy, but as a foundation so you're not paying to learn the basics.
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Second, you this week, sometime use an AI tool to build yourself one piece of real organizational structure: a master calendar, a sorted timeline of communications, a first draft budget for two households, pick one, build it, hand it to whoever, whichever professional on your team needs it then.
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Okay.
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Third, and this is the one I really want to land the next time you feel the pull to ask an AI tool, what should what should I do, quote unquote, about something involving your ex, your case, or your kids.
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I want you to catch that impulse and instead ask yourself the question I gave you a minute ago.
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Does this require knowing my specific judge, my specific ex, or my specific case?
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If yes, that question goes to your coach, your attorney, or your therapist, not the app.
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Fourth and last, if you've already done, if you're sitting on pages of AI-generated strategy that you are about to hand your attorney or your coach, or that you've already been operating on for weeks, that's okay.
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It's not catastrophic.
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It doesn't mean you've wrecked anything.
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It means you caught it, hopefully before it costs you.
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And you can re redirect that same energy starting today.
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Take whatever you've built, and instead of treating it as a plan, treat it as raw material.
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Hand the general concepts to your team as background and let them tell you what actually holds up.
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And this is usually what I do when a dad comes to me, is I'll say, you know, send it to me, give it to me, give me your prompts, and let me look at this.
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And then let's take the work that you've done.
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There's probably some value in some of that.
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Uh, usually there is because there's a lot of personal, you know, personal stuff that people talk about with the AI chatbots amazingly, that that helps to give some insight into stuff.
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So, so dads, just to bring this home, use the tool for what it's brilliant at.
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Don't hand it the wheel on the one thing that actually determines your future with your kids.
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I hope you found some value in that today.
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I think it's really, really important.
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If you did, please share this episode far and wide on social media.
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We're getting more and more traction every uh single week.
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Give us a star rating on whatever uh platform you're listening to or watching.
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Give us a comment or participate in the conversation.
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We're having a lot more conversations online as well.
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This helps other dads to really get involved in the community and get the help that uh that they need and deserve.
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Thank you so much for listening.
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Stay strong and God bless.