Month: July 2025

Speaking at the Trial Advocacy Workshop

Posted by Ron Kauffman on

I am honored and looking forward to speaking on the topic of opening statements at the Florida Bar Family Law Section’s biennial, 2025 Trial Advocacy Workshop. The 2025 Trial Advocacy Workshop will be presented this year at the JW Marriott Marquis in Miami from July 23, 2025 to July 27, 2025.

Speech trial ad

The program allows practicing attorneys a rare opportunity to improve their trial skills with complex financial and parenting issues in family law. Attendees work with sitting family law judges, fellow attorneys, and practicing forensic accountants and mental health professionals who serve as expert witnesses. Attendees prepare and present a family law case over the course of the five day workshop. The Trial Advocacy Workshop always sells out and this year is no exception. The Trial Advocacy Workshop is presented by the Florida Bar Family Law Section.

More information is available here.

Divorce, Infidelity, and Coldplay

Posted by Ron Kauffman on

Divorce, infidelity and the music group Coldplay coalesced this past week in and online ‘kiss cam’ that went viral. No one wants to be the “star of the internet” for a day the way Andy Byron became last week. But, the kiss cam seen around the world, and the legal aspects of infidelity and divorce, made big news in spectacular fashion.

Coldplay Infidelity

Trouble

Andy Byron is now the former chief executive of a New York-based tech company called Astronomer. Astronomer, of course, is the company behind Astro. Astro is the unified DataOps platform powered by Apache Airflow – an open-source workflow management platform for data engineering pipelines.

Byron’s wife, Megan Kerrigan, serves as Associate Director of Lower School. The couple has been married for several years and have children together. But last Wednesday, Byron was seen with Kristin Cabot, Astronomer’s “chief people officer”, on the “kiss cam” screen at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, during a Coldplay concert.

After realizing they had been caught on video at the stadium, Byron and Cabot reflexively ducked out of view from the camera to avoid being caught.

It didn’t work.

After the show, a 28-year-old Coldplay fan posted a video of Byron and his alleged mistress, Kristin Cabot, online. The video has now surpassed 122 million views. Astronomer’s website has announced that Byron has resigned from his role as CEO, and co-founder Pete DeJoy has taken over the helm.

Astronomer issued the following statement.

“Astronomer is committed to the values and culture that have guided us since our founding. Our leaders are expected to set the standard in both conduct and accountability, and recently, that standard was not met.”

Worse, reports suggest Byron’s wife Kerrigan has been “scrubbing” her social media presence by deleting Instagram and Facebook pages. Some observers claim she changed her Facebook page to remove her last name, but it’s not clear when that was changed.

Florida Divorce and Infidelity

I’ve written about the intersection of divorce and cheating before – albeit without references to Coldplay’s songs. Adultery can be the cause of a divorce, but can it impact the outcome of your care? There is still a statutory basis in Florida for infidelity to be an issue in your divorce proceedings, but not in the way most people think.

Adultery may impact the division of property. Florida is an equitable distribution state, and it is presumed that property should be evenly divided. This presumption may be overcome by proof that one spouse intentionally wasted marital assets.

This waste is sometimes known as dissipation. Paying for expensive alternative rock band concerts, jewelry, foreign trips, and dinners for girlfriends and boyfriends is considered wasting marital assets. The court has the power to reduce an adulterer’s equitable distribution to credit the marital estate for waste.

Florida law specifically provides that a court may consider the adultery of either spouse in determining the amount of alimony, if any, to be awarded. However, courts have struggled to reconcile the “fault” of adultery with the concept of “no fault” divorce. The result is a mix of weak opinions.

Chapter 61 discusses the “the moral fitness of the parents” as one of the factors the court considers in determining the best interests of a child. So, if one parent can prove that the other parent’s adultery had, or is reasonably likely to have, an adverse impact on the child, the judge can consider adultery in evaluating what’s in the best interest of the child. However, it would be extremely unusual (and even unlikely) for a custody case to be decided on those grounds.

Viva la Vida

Astronomer has acknowledged that “awareness of our company may have changed overnight,” but that its mission would continue to be focused on addressing data and artificial intelligence problems. Byron’s LinkedIn account is no longer public and he was removed from the company’s leadership page at Astronomer following the announcement. The site now lists co-founder Pete DeJoy as CEO.

The Byrons are rumored to reside in a small town near Foxborough, the site of the now-infamous Coldplay concert. If so, they would be governed under Massachusetts law. Although Massachusetts is a no-fault state, adultery is one of the potential fault grounds that a spouse can cite when filing for divorce in Massachusetts. This is known as a fault-based divorce as opposed to a no-fault divorce. Choosing whether to cite adultery as grounds for your Massachusetts divorce is a major decision to discuss with counsel.

The CNN article is here.

Biblical Grounds for Divorce

Posted by Ron Kauffman on

Are there biblical grounds for divorce you may not be aware of? The wife of the Texas Attorney General, who is a State Senator herself, just announced she is filing for divorce in her 38 year marriage “on biblical grounds.” The senator’s X post has Texans ‘talking the hides off cows’ about biblical divorces.

biblical divorce

In the beginning . . .

Angela Paxton is a Texas state senator; she is also the wife of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Senator Paxton recently wrote in a social media post that she has filed for divorce:

Today, after 38 years of marriage, I filed for divorce on biblical grounds. I believe marriage is a sacred covenant and I have earnestly pursued reconciliation. But in light of recent discoveries, I do not believe that it honors God or is loving to myself, my children, or Ken to remain in the marriage.

Ken Paxton pointed to “countless political attacks and public scrutiny” in his own X posting, saying the two “have decided to start a new chapter in our lives. I could not be any more proud or grateful for the incredible family that God has blessed us with, and I remain committed to supporting our amazing children and grandchildren. I ask for your prayers and privacy at this time.”

Texas has preserved the right to file for fault that caused the breakdown of the marriage, and these are grounds for divorce that go back well more than 100 years. One of the fault bases would be adultery, and that’s probably what the senator is referring to.

Florida Divorce Reasons

The official term for divorce in Florida is “dissolution of marriage”, and you don’t need fault as a ground for divorce. Florida abolished fault as a ground for divorce. I’ve written about no fault divorce and infidelity issues before. The no-fault concept in Florida means you no longer have to prove a reason for the divorce, like your husband’s allegedly failing to be faithful. Instead, you just need to state under oath that your marriage is “irretrievably broken.”

Before the no-fault divorce era, people who wanted to get a divorce either had to reach an agreement in advance with the other spouse that their marriage was over, or throw Texas Mud Pies at each other in court to prove some wrongdoing, like adultery.

No fault laws were the result of trying to change the way divorces played out in court. No fault laws have reduced the number of feuding couples who felt the need to resort to distort facts, lie, and the need to focus the trial on who did what to whom.

Don’t Mess with Texas Fam. Code §6.003

The Paxton announcement throws a wrench into attorney general Paxton’s efforts to oust U.S. Senator John Cornyn in one of the nation’s most closely watched U.S. Senate primaries. Democrats are looking for more senate races in which their candidates can be competitive. Democrats see Paxton as an easier target. So Paxton has to be careful not to ‘tip over the outhouse.’

The National Republican Senatorial Committee, the Senate GOP’s campaign arm, sharply criticized Paxton in a statement that offered a window into how bitter the primary race could become:

“What Ken Paxton has put his family through is truly repulsive and disgusting. No one should have to endure what Angela Paxton has, and we pray for her as she chooses to stand up for herself and her family during this difficult time”.

Paxton is a strident conservative and ally of President Donald Trump who earned a national reputation by frequently suing to try to block the actions of former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden in federal court.

Angela Paxton was present for the Senate’s impeachment trial, in which Paxton was also accused of having an extramarital affair with a woman who was hired by the real estate developer, but she was not ‘fixin’ to vote.’ He was acquitted by the more conservative senate, where an ally, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, presided over the trial.

Cornyn, proving ‘no tongue was hurt by speaking softly’ was asked by CNN for his comment: “Seems like a private matter.” But Cornyn’s campaign on X shared a local news report citing Angela Paxton’s divorce filing, as well as the NRSC’s statement lambasting the attorney general.

The CNN article is here.

Using AI and Divorce

Posted by Ron Kauffman on

Lawyers and non-lawyers alike, are increasingly using AI in their divorce cases and ending up in trouble. One Atlanta divorce lawyer who repeatedly cited to phony legal cases in her client’s divorce papers found out that using AI in your divorce can badly harm your case.

AI Divorce Lawyer2

Deus Ex Machina

Generative AI is saving lawyers time and money, but if used improperly, it could cost them their livelihoods. Generative AI is a type of AI model that creates new content, such as text, images, or music, based on large amounts of training data.

Examples for text include OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot, Google’s Gemini, Meta’s Llama, and Anthropic’s Claude, and for images ChatGPT, Gemini, Adobe and Midjourney. A generative AI model that is text-based is called a large language model.

But here’s the thing. When given a question or prompt, AI uses learned patterns to predict the best outputs, such as your motion or brief. Training a generative AI model takes months because of the enormous amounts of data and the neural network’s process of learning and optimization.

Generative AI is impressive but not perfect. AI predictions are just suggestions, and they can be wrong.

Atlanta divorce lawyer, Diana Lynch, is reported to have drafted an order a judge signed in May 2024 that referenced two cases that don’t exist. Lynch’s client filed for divorce in April 2022 and received a divorce decree in July of that year.

In October 2023, the ex-wife asked the county judge to reopen the case and set aside the divorce decree, claiming she had moved to Texas in 2021 and had not been properly served with the complaint. The judge denied the ex-wife’s request in a three-page order in May 2024.

But then the ex-wife’s appealed, and she pointed out the trial judge relied on two fake cases in her order denying her motion, rendering the order void.

Florida Bar and AI Use

I have written about computer and high tech issues in divorce before. Florida was the first state to issue an ethics opinion regarding the use of AI. To ensure client confidentiality, you should confirm that you maintain ownership of any uploaded data, learn how to delete your data, and review the AI provider’s license terms or representations regarding confidentiality.

Free AI models use your questions and uploaded documents to train future models. To maintain client confidentiality, you will need a paid subscription.

U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts warned in his 2023 report on the judiciary that commonly used AI applications can be prone to “hallucinations,” causing lawyers to submit briefs citing fake cases, the Georgia judges said. Hallucinations arise when an AI model generates incorrect or nonsensical information and they are factually inaccurate.

Her

On appeal. a three judge panel on the court of appeals in Georgia found that Ms. Lynch was not deterred when she was accused by her client’s ex-wife of making up case law references. In fact, she filed a response citing 11 cases that were also either fake or irrelevant.

“The irregularities in these filings suggest that they were drafted using generative AI. We are troubled by the citation of bogus cases in the trial court’s order.”

The judges said it might be the first time a Georgia appeals court has confronted the problems that can flow from a lawyer’s apparent use of artificial intelligence that generates content. They said other courts have tackled the issue. They also said Lynch added insult to injury by requesting attorney fees in relation to the ex-wife’s appeal and even used a phony case to support the request.

The judges imposed the maximum penalty on Lynch for her “frivolous” bid for attorney fees. They sent the case back to the DeKalb County judge to reconsider the ex-wife’s request to set aside the divorce decree. Their opinion references a study by Stanford researchers, who found generative AI models, including ChatGPT, “hallucinate” around 75% of the time when answering questions about a court’s core ruling.

The article is here.