Colombia registered 20,759 divorces in 2024 against 52,348 marriages, according to data from the Superintendencia de Notariado y Registro, meaning four out of every 10 unions ended in separation that year, up from three in 10 in 2023 and representing a 43% increase in annual divorce counts over the past decade, from 17,627 cases in 2013 to 25,272 in 2023, a structural shift that Colombia’s legaltech sector now treats as a commercial and social opportunity.
Separation made manageable is the core promise that new AI-driven platforms now make to separating couples, and the gap between that promise and the legal complexity of real divorce cases is where Colombia’s emerging digital legal market both gains traction and confronts its limits.
A market shaped by cost and procedural barriers
Colombia’s divorce law offers two routes, each with distinct costs and procedural requirements: a notarial divorce, which both parties must agree to and which a notary processes without a judge under Article 34 of Law 962 of 2005, and a judicial divorce, which a court handles when one party does not consent or when the couple disputes property, custody, or financial obligations, with the judicial route taking months or years longer and costing significantly more than the notarial process.
According to a 2024 survey by Dataifx, 81% of Colombians believe that differences in financial management accelerate divorce, and the Unión Colegiada del Notariado Colombiano reported that, as of September 2023, an average of 99 couples filed for divorce every day in Colombia, a volume that creates sustained demand for faster, cheaper, and more accessible legal services than the traditional consultation model provides.
Those two factors, cost and procedural complexity, are precisely the problems that AI-powered legaltech platforms claim to solve, which is why the launch of tools specifically targeting Colombia’s separating population marks a logical next step rather than a speculative bet.
DivorciApp and what Colombia’s LegalTech sector builds
Cafore Abogados, a Colombian law firm, developed DivorciApp, a platform that integrates artificial intelligence to guide separating couples through the structural steps of the Colombian divorce process, helping them organize the documentation required for a notarial procedure, understand each procedural stage and its legal consequence in plain language, and reduce their reliance on traditional hourly legal consultations for routine tasks that an algorithm can handle consistently and at lower cost.
The platform targets uncomplicated cases where both parties agree to separate and have no pending disputes over property or children, a profile that covers a significant portion of Colombia’s notarial divorce filings but excludes the contested cases that now drive Colombia’s rapidly growing judicial divorce segment, which a Bogotá-based legal data study covering 2021 to 2025 found increased 77% in 2025 alone.
Meanwhile, Colombia’s broader legaltech landscape is expanding beyond divorce, with AI applications covering document automation, contract review, and legal research across firms in Bogotá, Medellín, and Cali, positioning the country within a regional trend that the Universitaria de Colombia identified in March 2026 as one of the most active areas of AI adoption in the country’s professional services sector.
Where the technology falls short
Legal experts consistently note that AI tools perform well in structured, consent-based procedures but fail in the contested cases that involve child custody arrangements, unequal asset division, domestic violence background, or one party’s refusal to cooperate, which are exactly the cases driving Colombia’s surge in judicial divorces and where human legal judgment, courtroom presence, and ethical accountability remain irreplaceable regardless of how efficiently an algorithm organizes paperwork.
Colombia’s Proyecto de Ley No. 043 of 2025, currently in Congress and designed to establish a comprehensive regulatory framework for AI development and governance in the country, does not yet address AI-assisted legal services directly, leaving DivorciApp and similar platforms operating in a space where their technical capacity runs ahead of the oversight structure that would give courts, clients, and legal professional bodies confidence in their outputs.
In reality, separation made manageable is an accurate description of what these tools provide in the easiest cases and an incomplete one in every other, which means Colombia’s legaltech sector faces the same challenge its legal system does: the couples who most need efficient, affordable help are often the ones whose situations resist algorithmic simplification.