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，以及人们能够找到过去他们会为之付费的免费信息而遭受重创。收入大幅下滑，旧的行业难以找到新的商业模式。

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完成，或者远程操刀。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，就像技术从未被发明那样，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)的时代以来就没有太大的改变”，理查德(Richard)和丹尼尔•萨斯坎德(Daniel Susskind)父子在他们合著的《职业的未来》(The Future of the Professions)一书中表示。

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.

律师们依然提供价格高昂的定制法律意见。收入最高的合伙人居于律师事务所金字塔型结构的顶端，轻松地赚取巨额服务费，而初级律师组成的团队干着搜索判例和拟定合同的苦活。

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.

这种情况是否有可能即将改变？许多律师对于一个网站或者一款应用就可能完成他们的工作的想法嗤之以鼻。但这个行业以外的许多人，以及一些行业内人士，正在开发一些工具，他们认为这些工具将彻底颠覆传统的法律服务。

They have a powerful argument: few people these days can afford a lawyer.

他们有一个强有力的论点：现在没有多少人请得起律师了。

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)表示，请律师的费用高昂得令人难以承受。“如果我们大公司都认为很昂贵，我无法想象小企业和个人如何能够承受。”

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)来搜索法律意见。这会让律师毛骨悚然，”她说。

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.

法律咨询成本的上升让许多人震惊。“对大多数人来说，我们的司法系统的费用已经变得难以承受了，”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年提交给英国议会的报告中表示。

￡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.

最高端同时竞争也最激烈的法律市场——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，这个价格达到了每小时775英镑到850英镑，今年的价格区间上限有望超过每小时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超过100万美元，其中收入最高的律所Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz，每名合伙人的平均利润达到了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入和大多数人能够承担的价格之间的错位看成一个问题，其他人把这看成一个机会。他们表示，颠覆法律业的时机已经成熟。就像律师一样，伦敦的出租车司机也训练有素；掌握“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、高价格的服务被叫车应用优步(Uber)颠覆了，该应用让大量依靠卫星导航的低收费司机上了路。

A similar thing, critics say, will happen to lawyers.

批评者表示，律师们也会遭遇类似的事情。

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任职经历、创办过科技公司。他开玩笑说萨斯坎德说得太委婉了。他表示，法律服务“自《大宪章》(Magna Carta)以来”就未曾改变过了。他从律师的工作方式中看到了什么？“用礼貌的说法来描述的话，一个改造的绝佳机会。”

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，一家成立才1年多一点、位于加州帕洛阿尔托(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•阿鲁达(Andrew Arruda)。Ross Intelligence正在利用IBM的沃森(Watson)人工智能系统做一些目前由初级律师承担的调研工作。两人决定首先专注于美国破产法，因为他们认为，这是一个不受衰退影响的法律业领域。“破产总在发生，”阿鲁达表示。

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？阿鲁达说，假如你是一家小公司，你的客户之一破产了。你怀疑有一两个法律案例能够帮助你追回欠款。一名律师必须浏览判例（可能会利用关键词在计算机中搜索），而Ross系统能够通过迅速检索无数份文件，以寻找该公司需要的内容。

The Ross system is in its infancy, as are most of the products that their champions hope will transform the legal business.

Ross系统还处于起步阶段，正如支持者希望能够改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.

“游戏才刚刚开局，”旧金山公司Axiom的首席执行官马克•哈里斯(Mark Harris)表示。该公司号称是世界领先的科技型法律服务提供商，富时100指数(FTSE 100)成分股公司和《财富》(Fortune)100强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年代他曾任职于顶尖美国律所达维(Davis Polk & Wardwell)。在一位合伙人要求他为一位客户准备账单时，他意识到有些地方不对劲。当他把自己投入的工时加总起来以后，他意识到律所要求这名客户为一个月的服务支付相当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，不仅是客户对这种体制不满，许多初级律师也同样如此。“他们感到自己被压榨得太狠、薪资太低、不受重视，”他说。2000年，他和一个朋友创建了Axiom，为企业提供更为便宜的法律服务，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在服务客户过程中增多了对技术的使用。

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.

一些人用优步来解释法律业如何正在被颠覆，但哈里斯更愿意谈谈飞机是如何造出来的。奥维尔(Orville)和威尔伯•莱特(Wilbur Wright)兄弟是打造飞行器的手工艺人。今天的飞机不是由手工艺人，而是由以空客(Airbus)和波音(Boeing)为首的工业制造商制造出来的。

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，法律业依然处于手工艺人的阶段。律师们为客户打造个性化的意见。降低成本的方法是将这个过程的大部分工业化。Axiom提供的服务包括管理客户的合同。“我们拿到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不同协议之间的信息连接起来的数据模型，”哈里斯表示，“我们可能会查看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.

一些产品旨在帮助企业内部法务部门更有效率地管理他们的工作。位于英国西北部的公司Riverview Law推出了名为“虚拟助手”的系统。企业内部的法务顾问能够使用这些系统，在一个数字“仪表盘”上确认出现问题的部分、任何案件的风险状况、谁在处理该案、以及处理者所花的时间。

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，但他并没有律师执业经验。曾有过人力资源和招聘服务方面从业经历的他表示，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相关的信息掌握得太少。“这个市场上数据的匮乏实在令人惊讶。零售商和其他企业都拥有真实的数据并根据这些数据进行决策，”他说。

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相比，法律科技中的大部分似乎有些原始。但那些相信法律科技的人认为，这些技术能够远远超越将日常例行程序数字化，完成律师们认为只有他们能够做的复杂工作。

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.”

那么法律业也在接近其“优步时刻”吗？一些人对这个想法嗤之以鼻。“我入律师这一行以来人们就一直在谈论这个，”一名纽约的律师表示，“只有等亲眼看见我才会相信。”

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”.

那些最成功的律所的顶层人物没有多少动力去改变。这个体系对他们很有利。“大多数人工作了20年才到达这个行业的顶端，现在他们在大把赚取服务费，”Axiom的哈里斯说。作为合伙人，他们把利润分给彼此，几乎没有动力投资新技术。在他们看来，一家美国律所的营销主管表示，“事情没有到需要破釜沉舟的地步”。

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.

还有其他有利于传统法律业的因素在起作用。自2007年金融危机以来，监管力度加大。害怕犯错的企业会继续在法律服务上花钱。在它们进入新市场时尤其如此。

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)表示，存在“恐惧因素”。“人们总是愿意在未知事物上花钱。你进入新市场，那里有新的风险。（有）品牌受损（的危险）。首席执行官们会因为这种事情遭到解雇。”

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.

但企业客户正在要求改变。查普曼表示，不断上升的法律费用让现有体系难以为继。“客户开始造反，”他说。

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.

他表示，许多企业内部法务部门已经削减了成本。马丁提及沃达丰和其律师就固定服务费（而不是接受按小时计费）进行的谈判。这家电信公司还将合作律所从70所降至10所。马丁相信，技术能帮助企业法务部门进一步削减成本。“我对法律科技非常有信心，”她说。

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，萨斯坎德父子引用了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，专家享有的地位“和原始社会中祭司的地位没有多大区别”，行使“外行无法参与的秘术”。

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，律师们一直扮演着这样的角色，其中许多人还会继续扮演。对知名顾问的需求很可能将永远存在，尤其是对企业来说。但对那些无力支付法律咨询费用的人来说，科技带来了一些希望。虽然还有很长的路要走，但马丁主张，如果新应用能够取得成功，它们将给这个行业带来巨大的回报。

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.”

加大对科技的运用不仅会降低法律服务的成本，还会去除它身上的一些神秘色彩。她说，目的应该是“让企业和个人能够自行完成更多的法律工作。（这样）法律看起来就不会那么特殊了”。