According to data from the Registrar of Notaries, 20,759 divorces were registered in Colombia in 2024, compared to 52,348. This means that four in 10 unions ended in separation in the same year, up from three in 10 in 2023, and the annual number of divorces has increased by 43% over the past 10 years, from 17,627 in 2013 to 2013. With 25,272 people in 2023, Colombia’s legal tech sector is now seeing this structural change as a commercial and social opportunity.
Making separation manageable is the central promise new AI-driven platforms now make to separated couples, and the gap between that promise and the legal complexities of actual divorce cases is where Colombia’s emerging digital law market is both gaining momentum and hitting its limits.
A market shaped by costs and procedural barriers
Colombian divorce law offers two routes, each with different costs and procedural requirements. Notarized divorce requires the consent of both parties and is carried out by a notary public without a judge in accordance with Article 34 of Law 962 of 2005. The other type is judicial divorce. Judicial divorces are handled by the court when one party does not agree or when the couple is disputing property, custody, or financial obligations. The judicial route takes months or years and is significantly more expensive than the notarization process.
According to a 2024 survey by Dataifx, 81% of Colombians believe that differences in financial management precipitate divorce, and the Columbia University Federation reported that as of September 2023, an average of 99 couples filed for divorce every day in Colombia, a volume that is creating sustained demand for legal services that are faster, cheaper, and more accessible than those offered by traditional consultation models.
These two factors – cost and procedural complexity – are exactly the problems that AI-powered legal tech platforms claim to be able to solve. That’s why launching a tool specifically targeting Colombia’s diaspora population is not a speculative gamble, but a logical next step.
What DivorciApp and Colombian Legal Tech are building
Colombian law firm Cafore Abogados has developed DivorciApp, a platform that integrates artificial intelligence. The platform helps guide separated couples through the structural steps of the Colombian divorce process, organizes the documents needed for the notarization process, understands each procedural step and its legal consequences in plain language, and reduces reliance on traditional hourly legal consultations for mundane tasks that algorithms can handle consistently and at low cost.
The platform targets simple cases where both parties have agreed to separate and there are no pending disputes over property or children, and this profile covers a significant portion of Colombia’s notarized divorce filings, but excludes contested cases, which currently drive Colombia’s rapidly growing judicial divorce segment. A Bogotá-based legal data study covering the period 2021 to 2025 found a 77% increase in 2025 alone.
Meanwhile, Colombia’s broader legal tech landscape is expanding beyond divorce, with AI applications covering document automation, contract review, and legal research being deployed across companies in Bogota, Medellin, and Cali, placing the country within a regional trend that Columbia University identified in March 2026 as one of the most active areas for AI adoption in the country’s professional services sector.
Where technology is lacking
Legal experts have consistently noted that AI tools work well in structured, consent-based proceedings, but fail in contested cases involving child custody arrangements, unequal division of assets, backgrounds of domestic violence, or one party’s refusal to cooperate. These cases are exactly what has caused a surge in judicial divorces in Colombia, and no matter how efficiently algorithms organize the paperwork, human legal judgment, courtroom presence, and ethical responsibility remain irreplaceable.
Colombia’s Proyecto de Ley No. 043 of 2025, currently before Congress, aims to establish a comprehensive regulatory framework for AI development and governance in the country, but because it does not yet directly address AI-assisted legal services, DivorciApp and similar platforms operate in a space where technical capabilities precede the oversight structures that give courts, clients, and legal professional bodies confidence in their outcomes.
The fact is that making separation manageable is an accurate description of what these tools offer in the simplest cases, and is incomplete in all other cases. This means that Colombia’s legal tech sector faces the same challenges that the legal system faces. The couples most in need of efficient and affordable assistance are often those whose circumstances resist algorithmic simplification.
