Artificial intelligence (AI) can do a lot of amazing things. If you live in Australia and you are contemplating separating from your spouse, AI can be employed on your behalf as a mediator. Success with AI-powered mediation could eventually lead to divorce cases being settled entirely by AI legal platforms.

Our legal system is not as open to AI solutions as some other countries. If you are looking for divorce mediation here, you contact someone like Utah divorce attorney Anita Dickinson. She can act as a mediator between the two parties. If necessary, she can represent one of the parties in divorce court.

The question for AI mediation is this: can AI do for separating couples what a human attorney can do? That is what they are hoping to find out in Australia. The rest of the world waits to see the results.

Separate with an App

Powering this new AI separation mediation is an online app known as Amica. Australia’s government formally supports use of the app among couples looking to separate. For the record, the app only offers suggestions that couples are free to implement as they see fit. It does not offer any legally binding decisions. Unlike human mediation, couples are not required to pay any attention to what the app tells them.

So how does it work? The app relies on a vast database of previous divorce and separation cases to make it suggestions. Users input information pertaining to their current circumstances. This includes things like shared assets, the value of those assets, the conditions of separation, and so forth.

The app compares the information inputted by users to historical information found in its database. By crunching all of that data, it is able to offer the couple suggestions about how to proceed. For example, it can make recommendations on how to divide property.

Assuming the couple accepts those suggestions, attorneys can then write up appropriate separation documents. The couple avoids litigation by signing the documents and going their separate ways. When it works, AI-powered mediation reduces the stress of separation and divorce.

China’s Blockchain Justice

If you think AI-powered divorce mediation is stretching things, you might want to consider a high tech cyber court rolled out in China in 2017. The cyber court was built on blockchain technology combined with deep learning and AI. Chinese citizens in certain jurisdictions are now expected to use the electronic system to settle civil disputes.

Rather than going through standard court litigation, plaintiff and defendant enter information into a computer system where artificially intelligent software will analyze it. The software analyzes all the evidence on each side of dispute, then compares that evidence and the circumstances of the case with information from previous cases. It then renders a decision.

Unlike Australia’s Amica app, China’s cyber court reaches binding decisions. For the time being, those decisions have to be reviewed and approved by a human judge. However, the eventual goal is to eliminate judges altogether. Chinese civil law will eventually be administered by computer systems.

Divorce Court in the U.S.

Here on American soil, our divorce courts are just as busy as Australia’s. They are overloaded with cases that take much too long to resolve. Perhaps an AI-powered system could help streamline things. Maybe an AI system could help mitigate some of the quarreling and bickering often observed in divorce cases.

Who knows? Divorce mediation could be the domain of mobile apps just a few years from now. That may not be a good thing, but it nonetheless appears to be on the way.