How AI Can Help You Get a Better Divorce Settlement

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Episode Description - How AI Can Help You Get a Better Divorce Settlement

Most people going through divorce focus on finding a good attorney … but that might be the single biggest financial mistake you make. Jamie Lima, certified divorce financial analyst, certified financial planner, and co-founder of SecureSplit, knows that from personal experience. Watching his parents' divorce strain the family financially, then going through his own costly split in 2017, shaped everything about how he now helps people navigate the financial side of divorce so they can get a better divorce settlement.

In this podcast episode, Jamie breaks down why relying solely on your attorney can cause you to leave serious money on the table, what a divorce financial team actually looks like, and how AI and specialized software are beginning to reshape divorce-related financial analysis.

Jamie also talks about SecureSplit, a platform he designed to eliminate the expensive duplication of effort that happens when attorneys, CDFAs, and clients are all working in disconnected systems. He also pulls back the curtain on how AI is quietly reshaping divorce proceedings in ways most people aren't prepared for.

From how to prompt AI tools so they actually give you useful information, to the privacy risks most people never consider, to why your ChatGPT history could end up as evidence in your own case, Jamie offers a surprisingly practical (and at times very sobering!) look at what it means to be a smart, informed advocate for yourself in a modern divorce. The tools are powerful. The mistakes are costly. And knowing exactly what you're doing is critical.

Show Notes 

About Jamie

Jamie Lima launched Allegiant Divorce Solutions as a sister company to his traditional financial planning firm after navigating his parents' divorce at a young age and experiencing his own emotionally and financially draining divorce in 2017. With nearly 20 years of financial planning experience, Jamie intimately understands the immense financial challenges individuals face during a split. Realizing that the costly mistakes made in his own divorce could have been avoided with the right support, he became a Certified Divorce Financial Analyst®. Today, Jamie is dedicated to helping clients navigate the complex financial aspects of divorce to secure fair settlements with significantly less stress.

Connect with Jamie

You can connect with Jamie on LinkedIn at Jamie Lima and follow him on Instagram at Allegiant Divorce. To learn more about how to work with Jamie, visit his websites at Allegiant Divorce Solutions and SecureSplit.

Key Takeaways From This Episode with Jamie Lima

  • The Team Approach to Divorce: Host Karen Covy and guest Jamie Lima emphasize that relying solely on an attorney to manage a divorce is a critical mistake. A comprehensive divorce team should include professionals like certified divorce financial analysts (CDFAs), coaches, therapists, and realtors to address distinct emotional, logistical, and financial needs.
  • Attorneys are Not Financial Experts: While family law attorneys are highly skilled in legal strategy, courtroom management, and settlement drafting, they typically lack specialized training in financial planning, tax forecasting, asset tracking, or managing complex retirement accounts like 401(k)s.
  • The Launch of SecureSplit: Jamie Lima co-founded SecureSplit—an end-to-end divorce case management software with a strong focus on financial data. Launched in late March 2026, the technology modernizes family law analysis by replacing outdated legacy programs and human-error-prone Excel spreadsheets.
  • Eliminating Duplication of Effort: SecureSplit features a secure client portal where users can upload financial data directly. This setup saves clients and professionals significant time and money by preventing the common problem where a client must repeatedly supply identical information to their lawyer, accountant, and CDFA.
  • AI is Not Google: Using public artificial intelligence engines (like ChatGPT or Claude) as search engines for generalized legal queries returns boilerplate information. To get high-value outputs, users must craft specific, contextual prompts that define a distinct professional role (e.g., instructing the tool to act as a family law attorney dealing with a high-conflict custody dynamic).
  • Protecting Privileged Information: Entering personal information into public AI engines permanently destroys attorney-client privilege. Clients must never input specific advice from their lawyers, and all personally identifiable information (PII)—including names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, addresses, and account numbers—must be thoroughly redacted using tools like Adobe Acrobat before documents are uploaded to public platforms.
  • AI as a Conflict Reducer: The single most effective way a client can utilize AI during a divorce is for communication management. Running emotionally charged or angry messages from an ex through an AI tool with instructions to "soften the tone, maintain the point, and limit it to three sentences" strips out the hostility and drastically de-escalates conflict.
  • The Trap of Public AI Hallucinations: Blindly relying on public AI tools for high-stakes legal briefs or precise financial formulas can be dangerous. AI frequently "hallucinates" false legal citations and inaccurate data. True asset tracing, forensic accounting, and complex pension valuations still require human expertise to "trust but verify" the information.
  • Secure AI Within Legal Boundaries: Unlike public engines that use user inputs to train global models, the proprietary AI bot built into SecureSplit stays confined strictly within an isolated, secure case file. This allows professionals to leverage machine learning safely without risking privacy violations or exposing sensitive discovery materials to the public web.
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    Transcript

    How AI Can Help You Get a Better Divorce Settlement 

    SPEAKERS

    Karen Covy,  Jamie Lima

    Episode Transcript

    Karen Covy: Hello and welcome to Off the Fence, a podcast where we deconstruct difficult decision-making to try to figure out what keeps us stuck, and more importantly, how do we get unstuck? I'm your host, Karen Covey, a former divorce lawyer, mediator, and arbitrator turned coach, author, and entrepreneur.

    With me today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Jamie Lima. Jamie is the co-founder and CEO of SecureSplit and the founder of Allegiant Divorce Solutions. After watching his parents go through a divorce at a young age, and going through a tremendously expensive and emotionally draining one himself in 2017, Jamie launched Allegiant Divorce Solutions as a sister company to his traditional financial planning firm. Jamie recognized the challenges people face as they decide how to handle their finances relating to divorce. He is now a certified divorce financial analyst (CDFA) as well as a certified financial planner (CFP). Armed with his ever-growing knowledge and almost 20 years of financial planning experience, he's dedicated to helping his clients navigate the complex aspects of divorce and gain a fair settlement with much less stress.

    Jamie, welcome to the show.

    Jamie Lima: Oh, thanks for having me, Karen.

    Karen Covy: I am excited to have you on a whole lot of levels, but I'd like to start with a little bit of your backstory. I think from your bio I can guess, but can you fill us in a little bit on what made you get into this kind of work?

    Jamie Lima: Yeah, you teased it with that bio read, but if we had to go way back in the time machine, I saw my parents go through a divorce when I was a young kid. I was probably seven or eight years old, maybe even a smidge younger, and even though I was a child at that point, I recognized that this was heavy. It definitely had a financial strain on the family, on both my parents, and overall. My dad worked multiple jobs and my mom worked multiple jobs. I feel like that, in many ways, is what propelled me into the financial services world to begin with. I had always wanted to learn how to manage money and understand the nitty-gritty of it just so I didn't have to go through that same experience myself as an adult. That was an early lesson that propelled me into the financial planning world, and I had always wanted to do this type of work in some form or fashion.

    You mentioned that I'm a certified financial planner. I started working toward that designation around 2012 or 2013, which is when I passed the exam. I was already in study mode at that point because, unlike CFPs these days who get their results right away, when I took the test, you had to wait six weeks to determine whether or not you actually passed. While I was still in that study mode, I saw this designation and I thought it would be a neat niche. I felt a lot of people could benefit from the knowledge and experience of working with someone in that space.

    I was at a big-name firm at the time, and they told me, "We don't do that kind of work here, kid. Go back and make some more phone calls." So I did. Sure enough, just a couple of years later, I went through my own challenging divorce, which you mentioned in the lead-up. Had I possessed the experience, knowledge, and know-how that I have now, I probably would have made some different decisions. Fast forward a few years, and now here I am doing that work full-time, mainly stemming from those personal experiences.

    Karen Covy: Now that you have had the experience of both divorce and working in financial planning, what are some of the biggest mistakes you see people make when they go through a divorce without a financial planner by their side, or without someone like you informing them what to do?

    Jamie Lima: Even as a reformed attorney yourself, I think you would concur. I work with a lot of attorneys, I have a lot of friends who are attorneys, so please don't take this the wrong way, but relying on your attorney to do everything in the divorce is the number one mistake I see. A lot of the reason why is because they're trained on the legal side of things—how to negotiate, how to handle conflict, how to draft settlements, and how to manage the courtroom environment, which is something I could never do. But a lot of them don't even know how to manage their own 401(k). They don't know what's in it, they don't know how to manage investments outside of that, and they don't understand taxes. It's not because they don't care to, but they simply don't have that training. Having someone with that specialization as part of the divorce team can go a long way. To circle back, that's the number one mistake I see.

    Karen Covy: You're definitely preaching to the choir here. I firmly believe that anyone going through a divorce needs a team—more than just a lawyer, but a coach, a therapist, a financial advisor, and maybe a realtor. The list goes on and on depending on the facts of their particular situation. But in the financial planning world, and divorce financial planning in particular, you've taken things even a step farther. You are the co-founder of SecureSplit. What's that?

    Jamie Lima: SecureSplit is end-to-end case management for divorce cases, with a bent toward the financial aspects of each case. We know that, especially in family law, 70% of these cases are predicated on financial issues leading up to the divorce. Then, when you get into it, it becomes a matter of how to handle the division of the assets we've accumulated, how to handle the tax issues, and how to get the most fair and equitable setup.

    A lot of those decisions these days are made in software that was built when you and I were in high school, or, even worse, on spreadsheets. We're literally making life-changing decisions on Excel spreadsheets that may or may not actually have the right formulas in place. SecureSplit comes in to fix all of that. We're bringing the financial planning and financial analysis part of divorce work into the 21st century. We're leveraging AI and other technology to help attorneys, family law mediators, and CDFAs do this work at a much higher level.

    It is end-to-end case management where we can manage the intake of the client, organize the financial information, truly analyze it, and then export whatever we need onto the necessary court reports and forms. These attorneys and other professionals have one single place to go to do all the work they need to do on a daily basis, versus Frankensteining all these pieces of the puzzle together.

    Karen Covy: It sounds like SecureSplit is a computer software program for case management that divorce professionals use. Is that correct?

    Jamie Lima: Exactly.

    Karen Covy: Okay. Is that also a team-based program? For example, if I am the attorney and I want the CDFA to have access to some of this information, can I give them access or export the financial reports to them? Part of the problem I see that makes divorce expensive is the duplication of effort. A client comes in and gives their financial information to the lawyer, who inputs it into their system. Then they go to the CDFA and give them the same financial info, and the CDFA has to input it into their system, and so on. Does SecureSplit solve that duplication of effort problem?

    Jamie Lima: Yes, it does. I actually had a question yesterday where someone asked me if they can share this information with opposing counsel. I thought, "Why would you want to do that and show all of your cards?" It doesn't make any sense, so I wouldn't recommend anyone do that. But if you have a financial planner, a CPA, or someone else, you can share it. We can also do it intra-firm; if I'm your assistant, you can share information with me.

    We can securely message one another on a particular case within the platform, which helps eliminate the Frankensteining of all these communication channels. I don't need a separate secure channel to message my client. I can literally be in the case file and say, "Susie, please don't forget to upload your 2025 tax return by the end of the week because we need it for the financial affidavits." All of that can happen within the portal.

    Karen Covy: So Susie, in your example, goes to the platform as the client and uploads her financial information right into it.

    Jamie Lima: Bingo.

    Karen Covy: That is a beautiful thing because it can eliminate so much duplication of effort, meaning it eliminates a lot of cost for the client.

    Jamie Lima: Exactly. Not only the cost for the client, but the cost for the professional too. We just launched this at the end of March 2026. As a divorce financial planner myself, I had all these different pieces of software puzzle that I had to slowly start to unwind now that we have those capabilities within SecureSplit. Every few days, I'm going in there and deleting subscriptions because now I can do that work with one software program.

    The client benefits because of the cost savings, but the professional benefits as well because you don't have multiple layers of subscriptions that you can sometimes forget about, allowing you to keep those dollars in your pocket. The argument from attorneys is often, "Well, isn't that going to stifle my billable hours?" My argument back is that if you can manage cases more effectively and efficiently, you can handle more cases overall. Now you can start to scale your practice versus saying, "I can only take on 20 cases because I don't have the bandwidth." Now you can maybe take on double that because you have much greater efficiency.

    Karen Covy: That makes sense. Speaking of efficiencies, I want to latch onto something you mentioned a little bit ago, which is AI. A lot of clients now are using AI in their divorce—most of them not using it particularly well. That's really what I want to dive into with you. Since you've developed a software program and you use AI, are there right and wrong, or good and bad, ways to use AI in a divorce?

    Jamie Lima: Absolutely. The first thing we need to think about regarding AI, whether in your divorce or in any aspect of your life, is that tools like ChatGPT or Claude are not Google. We shouldn't be using these platforms the way we use Google. Asking it, "How do I make pasta primavera?" will get an answer, but it's not the way you should be leveraging the tools. Asking, "How do I get a divorce in California?" is probably not the most appropriate way to use it either.

    How these platforms work is by feeding an appropriate prompt into the platform. I see it all the time now; every email you get is AI-generated in a cut-and-paste format, and you can always tell when ChatGPT wrote it. But by properly prompting AI, I believe it can be a powerful tool to help you be an advocate in your case. What I see happen a lot of times is that the prompts are not great, which results in garbage outputs. It's garbage in, garbage out. If you type, "How do I get a divorce in California?" and then take that information to your attorney and say, "Well, ChatGPT told me this," your attorney is probably going to tell you to stay in your lane. But if you properly prompt it, it will allow you to have a much more favorable response that you can actually leverage within the case.

    Karen Covy: Let's dive into that. What's wrong with saying, "How do you get a divorce in California?" That is a prompt, so what's wrong with it?

    Jamie Lima: It's not detailed enough. One of the ways we can leverage these tools is by assigning a role to the tool. A proper prompt would be: "You are my family law attorney. You have knowledge in this particular area dealing with this specific thing, such as a typical high-conflict or narcissistic soon-to-be ex-spouse. I am coming to you as a client after 20 years of marriage, with two children, and I am employed by this company." When you give it all of that context, the response comes back much more aligned with your particular situation.

    "How to get a divorce in California" is a little too boilerplate and blanket of a statement. We want to prompt it with much more information because that platform will then go out and act specifically as a family law attorney. It's going to eliminate looking at other areas of law, other states, or other variables, and strictly focus on this specific scenario. You're guiding it down a path, steering it toward the right answer, and it will go get that material, even sourcing from family law statutes with those proper prompts. Does that make sense?

    Karen Covy: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, but it raises a big red flag in my mind as a lawyer. ChatGPT, Claude, and all of the AI tools out there are public. You're in a dilemma because if you need to put in more detailed information to get a usable response, any information you input into a public AI tool becomes public information. You don't want to put in confidential or privileged information. Let's talk about that.

    Jamie Lima: Yeah, you should absolutely not be putting personally identifiable information (PII) into any of these platforms. Even if you have an amicable situation and you're trying to run through different scenarios to look at what child support would look like, if you're going to use tax returns and pay stubs, pull them into a PDF and redact that information first.

    Karen Covy: Physically, how do you do that? Do you black out your Social Security number, or is there a computer tool you can use to take out sensitive information?

    Jamie Lima: Adobe Acrobat. We use Adobe Acrobat anytime we might possibly share anything that would be identifiable, like first names, last names, and those types of things. I think it's a $19 a month subscription, so you could use it for the duration of your divorce and then get rid of it later, but a $20 investment can certainly save you a lot of headaches down the line. To redact information, you simply open the document in a PDF format. On the left-hand side, there's an option to edit, and the drop-down shows "redact." You select that, highlight the words you want to remove, and if you select a specific word—let's say "Karen"—you can choose to redact all instances of that word throughout the document so you don't have to do it one by one.

    Karen Covy: So to the person who gets the document, it just comes out as a blank space or X's or something?

    Jamie Lima: It's just a black space, like somebody took a black Sharpie and crossed over that information.

    Karen Covy: Okay. So if I'm the client and I'm thinking of using an AI tool for my divorce, I would absolutely take out my name, my spouse's name, my kids' names, account numbers, and Social Security numbers. Is there anything else I should be pulling out of there before I input it into an AI tool?

    Jamie Lima: Dates of birth, addresses, phone numbers, and your signature. I think there are a lot of things you want to think through. Ask yourself: if somebody were to find this document on the side of the road, would they be able to piece it together and figure out who it belongs to? The chances of that happening are very slim, but it happens, and you have to be cautious. You cannot be overly protective of what you're putting into AI. You can still create the type of prompt I mentioned earlier without providing that sensitive data. It doesn't need your Social Security number or dates of birth. But if you can give a high-level, 36,000-foot perspective overview of your case, the information coming back is going to be much more thorough and ultimately more valuable.

    Karen Covy: Let's talk about this too, because the idea of AI and divorce law is a brand-new field. Things are happening fast and furious, and there is no established law in this area. But there are some courts now where lawyers are asking for things in discovery, like, "Give me all of the AI prompts that you used in this divorce case, and give me all of the outputs that you got from AI." It's an open question as to whether that information becomes discoverable, meaning whether your spouse can get it or not. What do you tell people with that in mind? Should you be using AI at all?

    Jamie Lima: I think you can use it. I can't remember if this is at the federal level or state level, but I know here in California, they have made it discoverable, meaning whatever you're using can be subpoenaed. You want to ask yourself the question: is what I'm typing into this prompt in ChatGPT, and my subsequent follow-up questions, something that I would want on the front page of The Wall Street Journal?

    If you are typing things like, "How do I keep my husband out of this asset?" or "How do I ensure that I stay gainfully unemployed so I don't have to pay alimony?" you probably don't want to put those things on the front page of The Wall Street Journal or into ChatGPT. There could very well be a day when you're sitting in the courtroom, and the judge looks up at a big screen displaying your prompt and says, "How do you explain this?" You don't want that to happen, so you've got to be very cautious. You've got to be smarter than the average bear when it comes to these things, and you can't let the emotions that usually bubble up change the rationale and rationality that you need when using these types of tools.

    Karen Covy: Yeah. Let's switch gears a little bit and talk about the flip side. Those are the ways you should not use AI in your divorce, but what should you use AI for? What are good uses where, if the other side asks for your prompts or output, it would be perfectly acceptable?

    Jamie Lima: The number one way I would use AI if I were going through my divorce today—which, thank God I'm not, because that was the worst experience ever—would be to take communications from the other side, run them through the tool, and tell it to soften my response, get my point across, and do so in three sentences or less.

    Karen Covy: I like that.

    Jamie Lima: I could not tell you how many times I experienced this, and I'm sure a lot of listeners do as well. You get an email from the other side, and it gets to the point where you have anxiety just opening your inbox when you see it came from your ex. You open it, and it's some War and Peace narrative about how you're a jerk, and this, that, and the other. Your instinct is to fire back right away, rapid-fire like a text message, because it feels so good in the moment.

    Instead, what I should have done if I had to do it all over again—and writing those angry responses can be good therapy sessions sometimes—is paste it in and say, "Here's what I'm thinking. This is how I would normally respond. Help me reply back in a more appropriate way, in three sentences or less." Then you just copy, paste, send it back to the other side, and be done with it. That is the number one thing.

    Karen Covy: I really like that because what you're essentially asking the tool to do is take the emotion out of it and make it to the point and neutral. That alone can take down the conflict level tremendously.

    Jamie Lima: Yeah. As a divorce coach yourself, I'm sure you coach your clients on this as well because it just makes sense. Helping people handle the emotional aspect of the divorce and trying to think through this without a highly emotionally charged mind is tough. Leveraging platforms like that can be super helpful.

    Karen Covy: Exactly. What about using AI in terms of financial information? A lot of times, especially if there are issues of dissipation or waste in a marriage and you have to go through stacks of credit card bills, or if there's a complicated financial situation, the amount of data in these records can be ginormous—hundreds or thousands of pages. Is it okay to use an AI tool to analyze that data for you?

    Jamie Lima: I think it's a trust-but-verify situation. Like a lot of things in our lives, we have to trust the information, but we also have to verify it. I'm sure a lot of forensic accountants and people like me who do asset tracing would argue that leveraging public AI to sort through your bank statements may or may not result in any valuable information. At the same time, I think it goes back to the prompt. You have to make sure you're prompting it correctly for however you want to leverage it. If you want to upload a year's worth of bank statements or tax returns, you must make sure the information is redacted and the prompt is right.

    Within SecureSplit, we have an AI chatbot that is continuously learning while staying safely within the confines of the specific case. In the near future, as we continue to teach it the right way, users will actually be able to go in there and say, "Take a look at account number 9765 from all the statements from January 1st, 2024 to December 31st, 2024. Flag all transactions over $2,500, and report back to me on the value of those transactions coupled with how those funds were spent." That type of prompt could certainly help you glean information from those statements.

    But again, you have to trust the information and verify it. Over time, we'll be able to teach our AI bot how to do some of the follow-the-money work where we can see that $2,500 was taken out of an ATM three times over the course of three days, and ask where that money went. That's where things get lost because if somebody is truly dissipating assets—for example, I had a case where a gentleman was spending $10,000 a month on prostitutes—it's hard to track and trace that money. No matter how good your AI skills are, it can be very difficult to find those types of things, and that's where the human element comes in. Forensic accountants and people like us who do asset tracing are needed to ask more questions and look deeply at different accounts and transactions to take it to the next level.

    Karen Covy: So it sounds like, at least at this point in history, AI is not going to replace a good forensic accountant.

    Jamie Lima: I don't feel like it will. But ask me in a month, because that's how fast things are moving in this particular space. If you ask me in a month, maybe my answer will be different.

    Karen Covy: Okay. If I'm hearing you correctly, it might be okay to use AI to analyze big chunks of data, but it's a maybe. It is definitely good to use it to tone down the temperature of your conversations with your soon-to-be ex. What are some other good uses of AI?

    Jamie Lima: I think it helps you be an advocate for yourself and your case.

    Karen Covy: How do you mean?

    Jamie Lima: A lot of times, if you don't have experience in this world, you can feel like the attorney has everything handled, or maybe you're working with a financial planner like myself and they've got it covered. But then there can be months where nothing happens in these cases, and you wonder, "Is this thing moving forward? Are we making progress?"

    Being able to go to AI, describe the status and the situation, and use it to understand some of the regulatory statutes in place—like timing and deadlines—can help stem some of those concerns and calm you down.

    Also, when you are interviewing attorneys, it can give you a great list of questions. It can tell you, "Based on the particular parameters and challenges you are facing in your case, here are the top five questions to ask as you interview attorneys." It helps you act as your own advocate. You can ask it, "Should I be asking my attorney about this? We had a hearing a couple of days ago and nothing really came of it. How should I follow up with my attorney to make sure we're moving this forward?" It really works well as an assistant or a co-pilot in the case. There are a lot of different ways to use it to help you be an advocate, keep your case moving forward, and help you ask the right questions at the right time.

    Karen Covy: Yeah, that's a big part of the job. That's a big part of the value I bring as a coach—helping people know what questions they should be asking and how to ask them in a way that is more likely to get a real answer. Nine times out of ten, when you ask a lawyer a question, the answer you get back is, "It depends." While I understand why they do it, it's not helpful information when you're trying to make a decision.

    Jamie Lima: Exactly.

    Karen Covy: I would also caution people that if you're asking an AI something like, "What should I ask my attorney?" you must assume, to your Wall Street Journal example, that everything you ask that AI chatbot might show up in your spouse's possession in court. A judge can see it and your spouse can see it, so be careful what you're putting in, because that could trigger the law of unintended consequences.

    Jamie Lima: Exactly. The part where you're taking information and communicating it to your attorney is covered by attorney-client privilege, but the part where you're asking ChatGPT a question and cutting and pasting it is not.

    Karen Covy: Right. If you put into ChatGPT, "My attorney said blah blah blah," guess what? That is no longer privileged. Even though your attorney told it just to you, once you put it into ChatGPT, it's game over.

    Jamie Lima: One hundred percent.

    Karen Covy: What about with respect to a CDFA or a financial advisor? Are there any other things people should keep in mind when prompting an AI tool for the financial aspects of their divorce? Is there anything else they should or shouldn't do?

    Jamie Lima: I would ask for references and citations. This carries over to the legal side of things too. If you are asking questions like, "You are my financial planner, how does my Social Security impact this particular settlement? Am I going to owe more money in alimony, or less? Is it even a factor?"—when you're asking questions where you absolutely need the answer to be right, you should be asking for references or citations.

    There was an attorney here in the state of California who was disbarred because he decided to leverage AI for his entire brief. Unfortunately, the AI hallucinated and provided him with false citations and references, and he is now disbarred. If you're advocating for yourself and working on your own case, that won't happen to you, but you still want to make sure the information you are getting back is reliable. It goes back to my earlier comments about garbage in, garbage out. Asking for citations and references allows you to double-check and trust but verify the information, especially when you're dealing with things that could potentially impact you for 10, 20, or 30 years of your life—like taxes, Social Security, or pensions. We handle a lot of pensions, and almost every single one is handled and calculated differently. Asking for those references allows you to double-check so you can ensure you're in a good spot and understand it correctly.

    Karen Covy: Talking about pensions raises a question that I imagine others might have as well. Since you said every pension is different, could you say to an AI, "My spouse has a pension with this company, they've been working there this many years, and this is their salary. What's the value of the pension?" Would an AI tool be able to give you an accurate pension valuation?

    Jamie Lima: It can get pretty close, but it is entirely dependent on the quality of the information provided. For example, I do a lot of work in the state of Alaska with attorneys who handle government pensions. But there are many different types of government pensions—some are for state teachers, others are for federal employees, and they all have different tiers. Sometimes we don't have all the information we need from the client, so we have to piece it together and figure out if we can make heads or tails of the actual value.

    In those scenarios, I will sometimes ask Claude to go find information based on rough employment dates to see what pension plan was in place at that specific time, because companies frequently change the types of plans they offer. If you worked for a company from 1985 to 1995, you might be on one plan, but from 1995 to 2005, it might be a completely different plan. Who has the time to manually research all of that? You can send AI out to gather that information and start putting it together.

    However, there are so many factors involved—like cost-of-living adjustments, the time value of money, inflation, age, and actuarial tables. It can get pretty close, but it's another one of those trust-but-verify situations. It will sometimes come back with a rough guesstimate. I actually had a case yesterday involving three pensions. As I was going through that experience with Claude, it started to give me values, and I thought, "Thanks, but no thanks. I'm going to go run the actual calculations myself." I ran the calculations, took the real reports, and fed them back into the AI without any PII to show it where it missed so I could continue teaching it for my project. So, it depends.

    Karen Covy: Right, but what you're talking about is using AI within the secure confines of SecureSplit. Is that software open to the public, or is it proprietary?

    Jamie Lima: Access to our AI bot, Casey, is strictly limited to our subscribers. That's why right now I can go in and ask Casey about a specific pension plan based on the documents uploaded. It will give me some information, but it won't give me everything I need because we have to keep teaching it. Because we are not sending it out into the public world, it only knows what it knows within that specific case file. Over time, that will evolve, but it's a safety and security protocol for us. We don't want it going out into the public internet; we want to use what we feed it and do it securely.

    Karen Covy: That makes sense. It sounds like the general message is that you can use AI, but you must be careful to use it properly. If you don't use it right, you might get useless answers and simultaneously open yourself up to having to share everything you did with your spouse.

    Jamie Lima: Yes, and you'll end up with egg on your face. Who wants to have that conversation? It's not a good feeling when you're disproven because you relied blindly on AI.

    Karen Covy: This has been a fascinating conversation and I've really enjoyed it. Are there any parting words of wisdom you'd like to leave with the audience?

    Jamie Lima: Relative to AI, you have to use it as a weapon in a good way—use it to support yourself and be your own advocate. Just be careful with how you use it because, like any weapon, it can be dangerous. You have to be very cautious about how you leverage it and how you utilize the output it gives you.

    Karen Covy: That makes so much sense. Jamie, thank you so much for sharing everything you have. If anyone is interested in finding you, working with you, or checking out SecureSplit, where is the best place for them to go?

    Jamie Lima: They can go to AllegiantDS.com for my divorce financial planning firm, Allegiant Divorce Solutions. For the divorce professionals listening who want to take the platform for a spin, SecureSplit is simply SecureSplit.com. We offer a seven-day trial so you can get in, try it out, and see how it fits into your practice.

    Karen Covy: That's awesome, and everything will be linked in the show notes. Again, Jamie, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time.

    Jamie Lima: I appreciate you. Thanks for having me.

    Karen Covy: And for those of you out there watching and listening, if you appreciated today's conversation and would like to hear more just like it, do me a big favor: give the episode a thumbs up, like and subscribe to the podcast, subscribe to the YouTube channel, and I look forward to talking with you all again next time.

    Head shot of Karen Covy in an Orange jacket smiling at the camera with her hand on her chin.

    Karen Covy is a Divorce Coach, Lawyer, Mediator, Author, and Speaker. She coaches high net worth professionals and successful business owners to make hard decisions about their marriage with confidence, and to navigate divorce with dignity.  She speaks and writes about decision-making, divorce, and living life on your terms. To connect with Karen and discover how she can help you, CLICK HERE.


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    divorce advice, divorce strategy, divorce technology, divorce tips, off the fence podcast


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