Music companies, travel agents, newspapers, taxi drivers. Many sectors have been ravaged by the internet, mobile phone apps and people’s ability to find free information that they used to pay for. Revenues have tumbled and old industries have struggled to find new business models.音乐公司、旅行社、报纸、出租车司机。许多行业都因为互联网、手机应用于，以及人们需要寻找过去他们不会为之收费的免费信息而遭到重创。

收益大幅度下降，原有的行业无法寻找新的商业模式。Surgery can now be done by robots, or performed remotely. Architects use digital tools to design buildings.手术现在可以由机器人已完成，或者远程编舞。建筑师利用数字化工具来设计建筑。

One sector, however, has carried on as if technology had never been invented: the law. Lawyers’ working practices “have not changed much since the time of Charles Dickens”, say father-and-son team Richard and Daniel Susskind in their book, The Future of the Professions.然而，有一个行业还一切照旧，就像技术未曾被发明者那样，这个行业就是法律。律师们的工作方式“自查尔斯狄更斯(Charles Dickens)的时代以来就没过于大的转变”，理查德(Richard)和丹尼尔萨斯坎德(Daniel Susskind)父子在他们年出版的《职业的未来》(The Future of the Professions)一书中回应。Lawyers still provide high-cost customised advice. The highest-earning legal partners preside over pyramid-shaped firms, raking in huge fees while teams of junior lawyers do the drudge work of searching for precedents and drawing up contracts.律师们仍然获取价格高昂的自定义法律意见。

收益最低的合伙人居住于律师事务所金字塔型结构的顶端，精彩地赚巨额服务费，而初级律师构成的团队腊着搜寻判例和制订合约的苦活。Could that be about to change? Many lawyers sneer at the idea that their work could ever be done by a website or app. But many outside the profession, and some inside, are developing the tools they think will turn traditional legal practice upside down.这种情况否有可能将要转变？许多律师对于一个网站或者一款应用于就有可能已完成他们的工作的点子嗤之以鼻。但这个行业以外的许多人，以及一些行业内人士，正在研发一些工具，他们指出这些工具将完全政治宣传传统的法律服务。They have a powerful argument: few people these days can afford a lawyer.他们有一个强有力的论点：现在没多少人请求得起律师了。

The cost is prohibitive, says Rosemary Martin, group general counsel at Vodafone. “If we corporations think it’s expensive, I can’t imagine how small businesses and individuals manage.”沃达丰(Vodafone)集团总法律顾问罗斯玛丽马丁(Rosemary Martin)回应，请求律师的费用高昂得令人难以承受。“如果我们大公司都指出很便宜，我无法想象小企业和个人如何需要忍受。

”Many smaller companies are taking risks. “They’re googling for legal advice. It would make lawyers’ hair stand on end,” she says.许多中小型公司正在冒风险。“他们用谷歌(Google)来搜寻法律意见。这不会让律师毛骨悚然，”她说道。Many people are alarmed by the rising cost of legal advice. “Our system of justice has become unaffordable to most,” Lord Thomas, the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, said in his 2015 report to the UK parliament.法律咨询成本的下降让许多人愤慨。

“对大多数人来说，我们的司法系统的费用早已显得难以承受了，”英格兰及威尔士首席大法官托马斯勋爵(Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales)在其2015年递交给英国议会的报告中回应。￡1,000 per hour每小时1000英镑The top law firms in the UK and US — the most advanced and competitive legal markets — have sharply increased what they charge. In the mid-1980s, partners at top London firms charged between ￡150 and ￡175 an hour, according to a report by the Centre for Policy Studies, a think-tank. By 2015, this had reached ￡775-￡850 an hour, with this year’s range expected to exceed ￡1,000.最低末端同时竞争也最白热化的法律市场——英国和美国的顶尖律所大幅提高了收费。

根据智库“政策研究中心”(Centre for Policy Studies)的一份报告，上世纪80年代中期，伦敦顶尖律所合伙人的收费在每小时150英镑到175英镑之间。到2015年，这个价格超过了每小时775英镑到850英镑，今年的价格区间下限未来将会多达每小时1000英镑。

In the US in 2014, 74 firms enjoyed profits per partner of more than $1m, with Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen Katz, the highest earners, turning in profits per partner of $5.5m, according to the journal American Lawyer.根据期刊《美国律师》(American Lawyer)，2014年美国有74所律所每名合伙人的平均利润多达100万美元，其中收益最低的律所Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen Katz，每名合伙人的平均利润超过了550万美元。While many see the mismatch between what top lawyers earn and what most can afford to pay as a problem, others see it as an opportunity. The legal profession, they say, is ripe for disruption. Cab drivers in London are, like lawyers, highly trained; mastering “The Knowledge”, the layout of the city’s streets, takes several years. But the cabbies’ high-quality, high-price service has been upended by Uber, the app-based taxi hailing system that has brought a flood of lower-cost drivers, using satellite navigation, on to the roads.尽管很多人把顶尖律师的收益和大多数人需要分担的价格之间的错位看作一个问题，其他人把这看作一个机会。他们回应，政治宣传法律业的时机早已成熟期。

就像律师一样，伦敦的出租车司机也训练有素；掌控“科学知识”(The Knowledge)——伦敦街道布局——要花上几年时间。但这些出租车司机高质量、低价格的服务从前车应用于优步(Uber)政治宣传了，该应用于让大量依赖卫星导航系统的较低收费司机上了路。

A similar thing, critics say, will happen to lawyers.批评者回应，律师们也不会遭遇类似于的事情。Dan Jansen is chief executive of NextLaw Labs, a legal technology company backed by Dentons, a global law firm. Mr Jansen, a non-lawyer with a background in management consultancy and technology start-ups, jokes that the Susskinds are being too kind. The practice of law, he says, has not changed “since Magna Carta”. What does he see when he looks at the way lawyers work? “A wonderful opportunity for reinvention is the polite way to describe it.”丹詹森(Dan Jansen)是法律科技公司NextLaw Labs的首席执行官，该公司是国际律所德同(Dentons)投资的。詹森不是律师，有过管理咨询公司的供职经历、创立过科技公司。

他打趣说道萨斯坎德说道得过于直白了。他回应，法律服务“自《大宪章》(Magna Carta)以来”就不曾转变过了。他从律师的工作方式中看见了什么？“用礼貌的众说纷纭来叙述的话，一个改建的绝佳机会。

”NextLaw is backing legal technology start-ups. Its first investment was Ross Intelligence, a Palo Alto-based start-up launched just over a year ago by Jimoh Ovbiagele and Andrew Arruda. Ross is using IBM’s Watson artificial intelligence system to do some of the research currently done by junior lawyers. The pair decided to focus first on US bankruptcy law because they thought it was an area of legal practice that was recession proof. “Bankruptcy is always around,” Mr Arruda says.NextLaw正在投资创业型法律科技公司。该公司的第一个投资对象是Ross Intelligence，一家正式成立才1年多一点、坐落于加州帕洛阿尔托(Palo Alto)的创业型公司，创始人是希莫奥比亚赫莱(Jimoh Ovbiagele)和安德鲁阿鲁约(Andrew Arruda)。

Ross Intelligence正在利用IBM的沃森(Watson)人工智能系统做到一些目前由初级律师分担的调研工作。两人要求首先专心于美国破产法，因为他们指出，这是一个不不受衰落影响的法律业领域。“倒闭总在再次发生，”阿鲁约回应。

How does their system work? Say you are a small company, Mr Arruda says, and one of your clients has gone bust. You suspect there are one or two legal cases that will help you recover what you are owed. Whereas a lawyer would have to scroll through precedents, possibly using a computerised keyword search, the Ross system will rifle through thousands of documents to find what the company wants.他们的系统是如何运作的呢？阿鲁约说道，假如你是一家小公司，你的客户之一倒闭了。你猜测有一两个法律案例需要协助你只得欠款。一名律师必需网页判例（可能会利用关键词在计算机中搜寻），而Ross系统需要通过很快检索无数份文件，以找寻该公司必须的内容。

The Ross system is in its infancy, as are most of the products that their champions hope will transform the legal business.Ross系统还正处于跟上阶段，正如支持者期望需要转变法律业的绝大多数产品一样。“It’s pretty early in the game,” says Mark Harris, San Francisco-based chief executive of Axiom, which claims to be the world’s leading technology-based provider of legal services, with customers that include half of both the FTSE 100 and Fortune 100 companies.“游戏才刚开局，”旧金山公司Axiom的首席执行官马克哈里斯(Mark Harris)回应。

该公司堪称是世界领先的科技型法律服务提供商，丰时100指数(FTSE 100)成分股公司和《财富》(Fortune)100强劲公司半数都是该公司的客户。Like the majority of his 1,500 Axiom colleagues, Mr Harris is a lawyer. He worked for Davis Polk Wardwell, a top-tier US firm, in the 1990s. He realised something was wrong when a partner asked him to prepare a client’s bill. When he added the hours that he had put in, he realised that the client was being asked to pay his entire annual salary for a month’s work. “I started getting obsessed: where is that money going to?” Apart from the partners’ profits, he realised, it was going into art that was hanging on the firm’s walls.就像他在Axiom的1500名同事中的大多数人一样，哈里斯是一名律师。

上世纪90年代他曾供职于顶尖美国律所约维(Davis Polk Wardwell)。在一位合伙人拒绝他为一位客户打算账单时，他意识到有些地方不对劲。当他把自己投放的工时加总一起以后，他意识到律所拒绝这名客户为一个月的服务缴纳相等于他一年薪水的费用。

“我开始冥思苦想：这笔钱去了哪里？”他了解到，除了合伙人的利润，这笔钱还花上在了律所墙壁上挂的艺术品上。It is not just the clients who were unhappy with the set-up, he says. So were many junior lawyers. “They felt overworked, underpaid and under-appreciated,” he says. In 2000, he and a friend started Axiom to offer cheaper legal services to companies, stripping out cost by having the lawyers work at clients’ premises, from home or from its own warehouselike offices. Over the years, Axiom has increased the use of technology in serving its clients.他说道，不仅是客户对这种体制反感，许多初级律师也某种程度如此。“他们深感自己被榨取得太狠、薪资太低、不不受推崇，”他说道。

2000年，他和一个朋友创立了Axiom，为企业获取更加低廉的法律服务，通过让律师在客户的场所、家中或者Axiom公司类似于仓库一样的办公室里工作来节省办公成本。这些年来，Axiom在服务客户过程中激增了对技术的用于。Scaling up规模效应Some use Uber to explain how law is being disrupted, but Mr Harris prefers to talk about how aircraft are made. Orville and Wilbur Wright were artisanal builders of flying machines. Today’s aircraft are not built by artisans but by industrial manufacturers led by Airbus and Boeing.一些人用优步来说明法律业如何正在被政治宣传，但哈里斯更加不愿谈谈飞机是如何其实的。奥维尔(Orville)和威尔伯莱特(Wilbur Wright)兄弟是打造出飞行器的手工艺人。

今天的飞机不是由手工艺人，而是由以空客(Airbus)和波音(Boeing)派的工业制造商生产出来的。Law is still at the artisan stage, he says. Lawyers craft individual advice for clients. The way to bring cost down is to industrialise much of the process. Among Axiom’s services are running clients’ contracts. “We take all their legacy documents and add structure to that information. At the core of the technology is a data model that links the information within and between agreements,” Mr Harris says. “We might look at renewal dates and cross-selling opportunities.”他说道，法律业仍然正处于手工艺人的阶段。

律师们为客户打造出个性化的意见。降低成本的方法是将这个过程的大部分工业化。

Axiom获取的服务还包括管理客户的合约。“我们获得客户所有的既往文件，将这些信息结构化。这项技术的核心是一个能将协议内部和有所不同协议之间的信息连接起来的数据模型，”哈里斯回应，“我们可能会查阅续约日期和交叉销售机会。

”Some products are designed to help in-house legal departments manage their work more efficiently. Riverview Law, a company based in north-west England, is launching what it calls “virtual assistants”. Corporate in-house lawyers will be able to use these systems to identify, on a digital “dashboard”, the units where problems have occurred, the risk profile of any case, who is working on it and how long they take.一些产品目的协助企业内部法务部门更加有效率地管理他们的工作。坐落于英国西北部的公司Riverview Law发售了取名为“虚拟世界助手”的系统。企业内部的法务顾问需要用于这些系统，在一个数字“仪表盘”上证实经常出现问题的部分、任何案件的风险状况、谁在处置该案、以及处置者所花的时间。Karl Chapman, Riverview’s chief executive, is a law graduate, but has never practised as a lawyer. With a background in human resources and recruitment services, he says he is struck by how little information lawyers and in-house legal departments have about their work, ranging from how much it is costing to how long it is taking. “The absence of data in this marketplace is a real surprise. Retailers and other businesses have real data on which to make decisions,” he says.Riverview Law首席执行官卡尔查普曼(Karl Chapman)是一名法学院毕业生，但他并没律师执业经验。

曾有过人力资源和聘用服务方面从业经历的他回应，从工作成本到工作时长，律师和企业内部法务部门对与自己工作涉及的信息掌控得过于较少。“这个市场上数据的短缺觉得令人吃惊。

零售商和其他企业都享有现实的数据并根据这些数据展开决策，”他说道。Much of the technology seems primitive compared to what has happened in other industries. But those who believe in it think it can go far beyond digitising everyday routine processes into doing the kind of complex work that lawyers think only they can do.和其他行业目前的情况比起，法律科技中的大部分或许有些完整。但那些坚信法律科技的人指出，这些技术需要相比之下打破将日常例行程序数字化，已完成律师们指出只有他们需要做到的简单工作。

So is law approaching its Uber moment? Some scoff at the idea. “People have been talking about this ever since I’ve been a lawyer,” says one New York lawyer. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”那么法律业也在相似其“优步时刻”吗？一些人对这个点子嗤之以鼻。“我进律师这一行以来人们就仍然在谈论这个，”一名纽约的律师回应，“只有等亲眼看见我才不会坚信。”Those at the top of the most successful law firms have little incentive to change. The system has served them well. “Most of these people have worked for 20 years to get to the top of the business and now they’re reaping the fees,” says Axiom’s Mr Harris. As partners, they distribute the profits among themselves and have little incentive to invest in new technology. From their point of view, says a marketing head at one US law firm, “there’s no burning platform”.那些最顺利的律所的顶层人物没多少动力去转变。这个体系对他们很不利。

“大多数人工作了20年才抵达这个行业的顶端，现在他们在大把赚服务费，”Axiom的哈里斯说道。作为合伙人，他们把利润分得彼此，完全没动力投资新技术。

在他们显然，一家美国律所的营销主管回应，“事情没到必须破釜沉舟的地步”。There are other forces working in the traditional legal profession’s favour. Since the 2007 financial crisis, the level of regulation has increased. And companies are frightened of getting things wrong so they will continue to spend on legal services. This is particularly true when they enter new markets.还有其他不利于传统法律业的因素在起起到。

自2007年金融危机以来，监管力度增大。惧怕受罚的企业不会之后在法律服务上花钱。

在它们转入新的市场时特别是在如此。There is a “fear factor,” says Joe Andrew, Dentons’ chairman. “People are always prepared to spend money on the unknown. You go into a new market, there are new risks. [There is a danger of] brand damage. CEOs get fired for that kind of thing.”德同的全球主席乔安德鲁(Joe Andrew)回应，不存在“不安因素”。“人们总是不愿在不得而知事物上花钱。

你转入新的市场，那里有新的风险。（有）品牌损毁（的危险性）。首席执行官们不会因为这种事情遭辞退。”The customer knows best客户最懂行But corporate clients are demanding change. Mr Chapman says the increasing costs of law make the existing system untenable. “Customers are starting to rebel,” he says.但企业客户正在拒绝转变。

查普曼回应，大大下降的法律费用让现有体系难以为继。“客户开始反叛，”他说道。He says many in-house legal departments have already cut costs. Ms Martin points to Vodafone’s negotiation of fixed fee arrangements with its lawyers, rather than accepting billing by the hour. The telecoms provider has also reduced the number of law firms it uses from 70 to 10. Ms Martin believes technology can help departments like hers cut costs even further. “I’m a real believer in it,” she says.他回应，许多企业内部法务部门早已缩减了成本。

马丁提到沃达丰和其律师就相同服务费（而不是拒绝接受按小时计费）展开的谈判。这家电信公司还将合作律所从70所降到10所。马丁坚信，技术能协助企业法务部门更进一步缩减成本。

“我对法律科技十分有信心，”她说道。In their book, the Susskinds quote Harold Laski, the political theorist and UK Labour party activist in the first half of the 20th century, who said that the expert enjoyed a status “not very different from that of the priest in primitive societies”, exercising “a mystery into which the uninitiated cannot enter”.在他们的书中，萨斯坎德父子提到了20世纪前半叶的政治理论家、英国工党(Labour party)活动人士哈罗德拉斯基(Harold Laski)的话，拉斯基曾说道，专家拥有的地位“和原始社会中祭司的地位没多大区别”，行使“外行无法参予的秘术”。

Lawyers have long played that role and many will continue to do so. There will probably always be a need for eminent advisers, particularly to companies. But for those who are unable to afford legal advice, technology offers some hope. It has a long way to go, but Ms Martin argues that if new applications can be made to succeed, they will bring great rewards to the sector.长期以来，律师们仍然扮演着这样的角色，其中许多人还不会之后扮演着。对著名顾问的市场需求很有可能将总有一天不存在，特别是在是对企业来说。

但对那些无力缴纳法律咨询费用的人来说，科技带给了一些期望。虽然还有很长的路要回头，但马丁主张，如果新的应用于需要取得成功，它们将给这个行业带给极大的报酬。

Greater use of technology will not only make law cheaper, it will also take some of the mystery out of it. The aim, she says, should be “for companies and individuals to be able to do more legal work themselves. [Then] it wouldn’t seem special.”增大对科技的运用不仅不会减少法律服务的成本，还不会除去它身上的一些神秘色彩。她说道，目的应当是“让企业和个人需要自行已完成更好的法律工作。（这样）法律看上去就会那么类似了”。

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