The role of legal technology in conflict resolution

Last November, for Resolution’s Good Divorce Week, I wrote an article about how legal technology can be used to reduce conflict during divorces and separations. In my article, I was particularly interested in echoing Resolution’s approach to reducing conflict within family breakdowns and encouraging a constructive approach.

Good Divorce Week happens once a year; however, as Head of Family Law at LEAP, I’m always thinking about resolution and, more specifically, about the role of technology in reducing conflict.

Setting the tone can help family lawyers avoid conflict

In family law, the conflict is rarely about a single issue but rather a culmination of issues. It could be a letter sent in haste, an email drafted in frustration, or a poorly managed file handover. When used well, legal technology can create guardrails to prevent such issues and help lawyers set and maintain the right tone in highly charged legal matters.

Within LEAP’s family law software, for instance, lawyers can access structured precedents, guided workflows, and intelligent drafting tools designed to support clear, consistent, and constructive communication. One of these tools is Prompts, LEAP’s latest AI feature, designed to draft legal documents in a fraction of the time with a library of family-specific prompts. For those unfamiliar, a prompt is an instruction to AI, for example:

Please write all responses in British English, using UK spelling and grammar conventions (for example: ‘colour’ instead of ‘color’, ‘organise’ instead of ‘organize’, and ‘centre’ instead of ‘center’). Avoid Americanised spellings throughout.

But prompts can go much further than spelling conventions, for example, by ensuring that the document produced is compliant with Resolution’s Good Practice Guide to Correspondence, with this prompt:

Please write all responses in a constructive, informative and effective way; without emotive or inflammatory language; easily understandable, without jargon or complicated language.

In family law, the first letter often sets the tone, so ensuring that tone is measured, professional, and aligned with industry standards on resolution ethos is fundamental. Legal technology can reduce the mental burden of applying a resolution ethos (reducing confrontation and promoting solutions) and automatically embed it into family lawyers’ daily processes. When workflows, document templates, and AI prompts are structured around constructive communication, it reduces the risk of reactive drafting, creates consistency across teams, and supports younger lawyers in learning the right tone.

Emotionally charged letters, often dictated or typed in haste, could also be put through an AI prompt to rephrase or restructure to take out some of the hostility, whilst still getting the crucial issues across

Taking steps to ensure safer participation: Video technology

Conflict can often spark from in-person meetings, so taking steps to ensure safer participation is critical. Since the pandemic, video conferencing has become increasingly use in family law, from meetings with solicitors to remote mediation sessions and Court hearings.

Often, when there has been domestic abuse in a relationship, the prospect of being physically in the same room as their abuser can rule out many forms of Non-Court Dispute Resolution (NCDR). However, facilitating these sessions via video platforms like Zoom or Teams can help make these forms of NCDR available. Parties can meet at their solicitors’ offices or at their own homes, reducing their anxiety about meeting the other person. Being familiar and comfortable in an environment can help calm a client, making them more likely to give clear, cohesive instructions.

With the court embracing technology during COVID, video hearings have increased. Every lawyer experiences highly emotional clients making irrational or unreasonable decisions, and by reducing the anxiety because the party has not had to be near their ex, technology will undoubtedly help to reduce the conflict between parties and boost conflict resolution.

In short, reducing anxiety reduces reactivity, which in turn reduces conflict.

Practical conflict reduction: Parenting technology

The use of parenting calendars has also increased, both in the family home and in separated families, allowing parents to share a diary of key events (parents’ evenings, sports clubs, nativity performances). This allows parents to plan when children will be with them, so there is less need to swap weekends to facilitate arrangements and thus reduce areas of conflict.

In Australia (where LEAP originated), our Family Law team has developed Parenting Calendar +, an all-in-one solution that lawyers can share with their clients and the other parent. Once a plan has been agreed, various documents (our English equivalents being a Parenting Plan and a Child Arrangements Order) can be drafted. This removes the ability for inflammatory comments to be included in correspondence, thus reducing the overall conflict.

A fantastic example of technology in practice is the co-parenting app Our Family Wizard, which uses technology to help reduce conflict caused by parents' inflammatory language through its ToneMeter™. The tool automatically reviews the message before it is sent to the other parent, picking up on trigger words or phrases and highlighting these as potentially “aggressive” or “upsetting”, allowing the parent to change this. This doesn’t prevent the message from being sent; however, it flags to that person the impact it may have.

This is where AI can be incredibly helpful, not to argue better, but to communicate better.

Setting a firm-wide communication discipline

The Family Justice Council’s guidance on neurodiversity within the Family Justice System highlights the importance of communication adjustments: clear language, reduced ambiguity, structured information, and suitable processing time.

This is an area where technology could play a genuinely transformative role.

Imagine a prompt built into your case management system that says: “Please redraft this letter using clear, concrete language, short sentences and structured bullet points. Avoid idioms and figurative expressions. Highlight key dates and actions required.”

Technology could help lawyers adjust tone and structure quickly and consistently, making family justice more accessible and less distressing for all the parties involved.

A prompt could also adapt a letter and provide a short, bullet-pointed summary of the key points for the solicitor to use as an aide mémoire when calling the client to discuss the issue.

AI tools automatically integrated into platforms such as LEAP’s legal software can support drafting, summarising, and refining correspondence, saving family law firms time and promoting consistency.

A few considerations on the ethical use of AI

AI does not automatically reduce conflict. Today’s Family Lawyer reported a growing discussion about litigants in person using AI tools to generate documents in family proceedings. If someone without legal training asks AI to “strengthen” their position, the output may amplify peripheral grievances rather than focus on legally relevant points. That can lengthen proceedings, increase costs and escalate arguments.

The use of free AI tools also heightens concerns that private data may be in the public domain, as many safeguards which exist within specific legal technologies simply do not exist in platforms such as ChatGPT.

Technology used without guidance can inflame rather than resolve; this is where professional oversight matters, as legal tech should not replace legal judgment.

Family breakdown is, by its nature, emotional. But, if used wisely, legal technology can reduce conflict and promote constructive correspondence, make communication more accessible, and embed Resolution’s ethos into daily practice.

As lawyers, we must consider not only our professional responsibilities but also our ethical responsibilities. We should use AI cautiously and intentionally to add value, and not simply because it is available.

LEAP’s legal technology is not just digitising family law. It’s reshaping it in a way that is calmer, clearer and more humane, so we can help lawyers help people.

About the author

With over 20 years’ experience in Family Law, including as a former Partner at Brethertons LLP, Katie Phillips brings deep expertise in complex divorce, financial remedy, and children law cases. As Head of Family Law at LEAP Legal Software, she combines her practical legal experience with a passion for innovation, helping family law firms harness technology to work smarter, enhance client care, and navigate the evolving justice system.