Why family law disclosure is broken and how to change it

The disclosure process in family law is broken on multiple levels. It’s been that way for a long time; but there are a number of technologies that have recently become good enough to have a big impact on how this process will work going forward. This won’t just make things more efficient, it will change the shape of how they are done. 

I’d like to build on what we announced at the Queensland Law Society’s EPIC innovation event in June around our AI-based disclosure technology by touching on the problem, the emerging solution, what this means for family lawyers and what you can do with it right now.

What do you mean by broken?

I mean that the process moves at a glacial speed. That it requires far more effort than clients want to pay for it. That it prevents matters from progressing. That the work is thankless and under-appreciated. That it can already be out of date by the time it’s finished. 

It is a source of endless frustration for lawyers whose matters are stuck in a holding pattern. It is a source of endless frustration for clients who wish their lawyer would just get on with things. 

What’s the problem?

While busily working out how to best incorporate our Consensus Accelerator technology to everyday legal practice (the very same one we won the 2018 ALMPA/LexisNexis Thought Leadership Award for), we've been talking to a lot of lawyers. While that innovation is focused on the agreement itself, we’re consistently hearing that there is a chronic pain point earlier in the process that we need to address first: getting disclosure and settling the pool.

This is a deeply felt need and one of the biggest sources of mutual frustration between lawyers and their clients. 

This is a three part problem:

1. Getting the information and supporting documents in the first place.
2. Working out what it means.
3. Bringing the client on the journey.

1 . Getting the information and supporting documents in the first place

This is the pain felt most deeply and most often by family lawyers. You ask the client for the basic information that you need to start working on the matter. They promptly ignore you. You eventually bludgeon enough sketchy, incomplete information out of them to make a start, and then they baulk at the bill and wonder why things haven’t progressed more.

There are few things as disempowering for a lawyer than sitting on their hands, waiting for information that only the client can provide.

2. Working out what it means

Once you’ve finally got your hands on it, the volume of information you then need to work through is expanding rapidly. Looking back over my own credit card transactions for last week, I had no fewer than 17 transactions on Monday alone. Consider 12 months of bank statements across multiple accounts, and you might have literally thousands of transactions to wrangle with for even simple matters.

On the flip side, you’ve now got a richer source if information to work with than ever. There is an incredible amount of insight to be gained from this data, but poring over piles of printed statements manually just isn’t viable at these volumes.

3. Bringing the client on the journey

This is something we’ve talked to many separating couples about in our design research interviews. Clients don’t value the work you put into preparing disclosure. Period. They rarely understand why you’re asking them to provide all of this information, and they’re mystified as to why everything is taking so long. They get the first bill and feel as though they’ve been charged a bucket of money when nothing has happened yet.

This is a classic service design value perception problem. There is a gulf between the value that has been delivered and the value that has been perceived by the client. I’ve seen this in a number of sectors across my career, but it’s a particular problem in the law.

What can we do about it?

One of my favourite design thinking exercises is to ask the question “how would this work if it was magic?”. Although we clearly don’t have the benefit of magic, this question helps to unearth the key things a novel solution should deliver, without current constraints and processes skewing our thinking. 

Here is our answer to the "if the process was magic” question: The key elements of the client’s disclosure would appear without them having to provide them to us. We’d instantly be able to see the insights in all of the data and we’d be able to do the same for the other party. We’d immediately know what was in dispute and be in a position to progress the matter.

This is exactly what we’re building and we think of it as an accelerated pool. We use a combination of data integrations and artificial intelligence to make it possible. This is how it works:

• We source the key elements in the pool. With a temporary authority and credentials link from the client, we can gather income tax returns, super accounts, tax debts and bank statements on their behalf. We can also get desktop valuations and ownership on property.
• We work out what this information means by using AI to analyse it for insights. This includes insights around undisclosed accounts, evidence of wastage, large one-off transactions, regular transactions in and out and analysis of income and expenditure against taxable income.
• We provide this in a platform that enables you to cooperatively build out a shared balance sheet with the other side. You can also give your client visibility of agreement on the pool as it emerges.

What does this mean for family lawyers?

This means that you can provide your clients more value, with significantly less effort. You can work with better information, and - when appropriate - work more cooperatively with the other side to settle the pool. We see it as inevitable that this is how disclosure and pool conversations will happen in the future - the only question is how quickly this will become standard practice and who will benefit most early on.

As valuable as this is for a single party, it becomes significantly more powerful when both sides use it to reach a settled pool in timeframes that can be measured in days rather than months. This won’t always be possible of course, but is the real intent behind this innovation. Empowering people to have better conversations around conflict is a key part of Adieu’s mission and the thread that ties this, our Consensus Accelerator and Lumi together.

Can I have this now?

In short - yes. We’re piloting this with family lawyers right now. If you’d like to be part of our early access group, reach out to us here and we’d love to talk you through what we’re doing and get you involved if it resonates with you.