Looking back at my divorce, I keep thinking about one thing:

If I had had AI then, I would have known what questions to ask.

That might have changed my life.

My ex-husband was a lawyer. I was not. I had spent years as the primary caregiver and stay-at-home parent. When our marriage ended, we did not enter the process with equal access to legal knowledge, financial knowledge, or institutional power.

But that imbalance didn't begin with the divorce.

It had been cultivated throughout the marriage.

The Imbalance Started Long Before the Divorce

Throughout my marriage, I was financially abused.

My husband routinely criticized me for spending money. The message was unmistakable: he regarded the money as his money, not our money, and he made that clear again and again.

Over time, that changes how you think.

You begin questioning whether you're entitled to spend money at all. You learn that accessing the family's resources will produce conflict. You become accustomed to defending ordinary expenses, asking permission, or simply going without.

Then the marriage ends, and suddenly the legal system expects you to behave like an economically independent litigant.

I faced an extraordinary contradiction: I needed independent legal representation precisely because I was financially vulnerable, but the financial abuse itself had left me without an independent understanding of how to access our marital resources to pay for that representation.

I didn't know what I was entitled to. I didn't know what mechanisms might exist to obtain money for counsel. I didn't even know all the questions I should have been asking.

Meanwhile, my husband was a lawyer.

The law might have regarded us as two parties negotiating a settlement.

But two people sitting across a table are not necessarily equals.

One may understand the machinery.

The other may have spent years being taught that she isn't even entitled to the fuel that makes the machinery run.

The Most Important Question Is Often the One You Don't Know Exists

When people talk about access to justice, they usually talk about access to lawyers.

That's important. But there is another problem that comes before the lawyer:

You have to know what you don't know.

You have to know that a financial disclosure may be incomplete before you can challenge it. You have to understand that an asset might belong partly to you before you can ask where it went. You have to recognize that language in a settlement could have consequences decades later before you agree to it today.

A person unfamiliar with the legal system may not even possess the vocabulary necessary to formulate the question.

That is where AI changes something fundamental.

Today, a woman going through a complicated divorce can sit alone with her phone and ask:

My husband controls all our finances. I don't understand what we own. What documents should I be asking for?

Or:

My spouse is an attorney and I feel completely outmatched in mediation. What should I understand before signing anything?

Or:

I don't have independent access to our money. How am I supposed to obtain my own lawyer?

Or simply:

Something about this doesn't seem right. Help me figure out what questions I should be asking.

AI cannot determine whether she is legally right. It cannot replace competent counsel. It can make mistakes, and legal advice still requires qualified professionals who understand the facts and jurisdiction.

But AI can do something extraordinarily valuable.

It can give her a map.

AI Changes the Information Asymmetry

For centuries, professional knowledge has been expensive.

Law, finance, medicine, taxation and government all developed specialized languages. If you didn't speak those languages, you depended upon someone who did.

That created an enormous information asymmetry between institutions and ordinary people, and sometimes between two people inside the same marriage.

Generative AI begins to collapse that asymmetry.

It can translate unfamiliar legal language into ordinary English. It can generate questions for an attorney. It can explain terminology. It can help organize financial records and construct timelines. It can identify categories of documents someone may want to ask about.

Most importantly, it can tell someone that the strange thing she is describing has a name.

A name becomes a search term.

A search term becomes a question.

A question can become an action.

None of that guarantees justice.

But ignorance creates vulnerability.

I Didn't Need AI to Be My Lawyer

If I could send today's technology backward in time to myself during my divorce, I wouldn't ask it to litigate my case.

I would ask it to help me see the case.

What should I be looking for?

What haven't I been given?

What are the long-term consequences of this agreement?

What financial information should I have access to?

How can someone without independent money obtain independent representation?

What assumptions am I making because I've spent years living inside this particular marriage?

What would an experienced family-law attorney investigate?

What should I absolutely understand before I sign?

And perhaps most importantly:

What question haven't I thought to ask?

That may be one of AI's most powerful capabilities.

Access to Intelligence Is Access to Power

We tend to measure the AI revolution in productivity: faster programming, automated paperwork, cheaper customer service, more efficient companies.

But perhaps one of its most consequential effects will happen somewhere much quieter.

A frightened woman sits alone with a phone.

She doesn't understand the system she's caught inside. Her spouse may understand it much better than she does. He may control the money. He may have spent years convincing her that the resources accumulated during their marriage aren't really hers.

And now, for the first time, she has something she can interrogate without permission.

She can ask another question.

And another.

And another.

She can arrive at a lawyer's office knowing some of the vocabulary. She can recognize when an answer doesn't address her question. She can organize documents before they disappear. She can ask what information she is missing. She can understand enough of the machinery to demand that the professionals around her explain what is happening.

AI doesn't make institutions fair.

It doesn't make powerful people honest.

It doesn't replace lawyers.

And it certainly doesn't guarantee justice.

But it can give ordinary people something they have historically been denied:

a flashlight inside systems designed by experts.

I didn't have that flashlight when I needed it.

I hope women going through divorce today are using it.