法律業收入大幅下滑 迎來優步時刻

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.

音樂公司、旅行社、報紙、出租車司機。許多行業都因爲互聯網、手機應用，以及人們能夠找到過去他們會爲之付費的免費信息而遭受重創。收入大幅下滑，舊的行業難以找到新的商業模式。

Surgery can now be done by robots, or performed remotely. Architects use digital tools to design buildings.

手術現在可以由機器人完成，或者遠程操刀。建築師利用數字化工具來設計建築。

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，有一個行業還一切照舊，就像技術從未被髮明那樣，這個行業就是法律。律師們的工作方式“自查爾斯•狄更斯(Charles Dickens)的時代以來就沒有太大的改變”，理查德(Richard)和丹尼爾•薩斯坎德(Daniel Susskind)父子在他們合著的《職業的未來》(The Future of the Professions)一書中表示。

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.

律師們依然提供價格高昂的定製法律意見。收入最高的合夥人居於律師事務所金字塔型結構的頂端，輕鬆地賺取鉅額服務費，而初級律師組成的團隊幹着搜索判例和擬定合同的苦活。

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.

這種情況是否有可能即將改變？許多律師對於一個網站或者一款應用就可能完成他們的工作的想法嗤之以鼻。但這個行業以外的許多人，以及一些行業內人士，正在開發一些工具，他們認爲這些工具將徹底顛覆傳統的法律服務。

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

他們有一個強有力的論點：現在沒有多少人請得起律師了。

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.”

沃達豐(Vodafone)集團總法律顧問羅斯瑪麗•馬丁(Rosemary Martin)表示，請律師的費用高昂得令人難以承受。“如果我們大公司都認爲很昂貴，我無法想象小企業和個人如何能夠承受。”

Many smaller companies are taking risks. “They’re googling for legal advice. It would make lawyers’ hair stand on end,” she says.

許多中小型公司正在冒風險。“他們用谷歌(Google)來搜索法律意見。這會讓律師毛骨悚然，”她說。

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.

法律諮詢成本的上升讓許多人震驚。“對大多數人來說，我們的司法系統的費用已經變得難以承受了，”英格蘭及威爾士首席大法官托馬斯勳爵(Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales)在其2015年提交給英國議會的報告中表示。

￡1,000 per hour

每小時1000英鎊

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.

最高端同時競爭也最激烈的法律市場——英國和美國的頂尖律所大幅提高了收費。根據智庫“政策研究中心”(Centre for Policy Studies)的一份報告，上世紀80年代中期，倫敦頂尖律所合夥人的收費在每小時150英鎊到175英鎊之間。到2015年，這個價格達到了每小時775英鎊到850英鎊，今年的價格區間上限有望超過每小時1000英鎊。

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.

根據期刊《美國律師》(American Lawyer)，2014年美國有74所律所每名合夥人的平均利潤超過100萬美元，其中收入最高的律所Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz，每名合夥人的平均利潤達到了550萬美元。

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.

儘管很多人把頂尖律師的收入和大多數人能夠承擔的價格之間的錯位看成一個問題，其他人把這看成一個機會。他們表示，顛覆法律業的時機已經成熟。就像律師一樣，倫敦的出租車司機也訓練有素；掌握“知識”(The Knowledge)——倫敦街道佈局——要花上幾年時間。但這些出租車司機高質量、高價格的服務被叫車應用優步(Uber)顛覆了，該應用讓大量依靠衛星導航的低收費司機上了路。

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

批評者表示，律師們也會遭遇類似的事情。

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的首席執行官，該公司是國際律所德同(Dentons)投資的。詹森不是律師，有過管理諮詢公司的任職經歷、創辦過科技公司。他開玩笑說薩斯坎德說得太委婉了。他表示，法律服務“自《大憲章》(Magna Carta)以來”就未曾改變過了。他從律師的工作方式中看到了什麼？“用禮貌的說法來描述的話，一個改造的絕佳機會。”

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正在投資創業型法律科技公司。該公司的第一個投資對象是Ross Intelligence，一家成立才1年多一點、位於加州帕洛阿爾託(Palo Alto)的創業型公司，創始人是希莫•奧比亞赫萊(Jimoh Ovbiagele)和安德魯•阿魯達(Andrew Arruda)。Ross Intelligence正在利用IBM的沃森(Watson)人工智能系統做一些目前由初級律師承擔的調研工作。兩人決定首先專注於美國破產法，因爲他們認爲，這是一個不受衰退影響的法律業領域。“破產總在發生，”阿魯達表示。

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.

他們的系統是如何運作的呢？阿魯達說，假如你是一家小公司，你的客戶之一破產了。你懷疑有一兩個法律案例能夠幫助你追回欠款。一名律師必須瀏覽判例（可能會利用關鍵詞在計算機中搜索），而Ross系統能夠通過迅速檢索無數份文件，以尋找該公司需要的內容。

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

Ross系統還處於起步階段，正如支持者希望能夠改變法律業的絕大多數產品一樣。

“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.

“遊戲纔剛剛開局，”舊金山公司Axiom的首席執行官馬克•哈里斯(Mark Harris)表示。該公司號稱是世界領先的科技型法律服務提供商，富時100指數(FTSE 100)成分股公司和《財富》(Fortune)100強公司半數都是該公司的客戶。

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名同事中的大多數人一樣，哈里斯是一名律師。上世紀90年代他曾任職於頂尖美國律所達維(Davis Polk & Wardwell)。在一位合夥人要求他爲一位客戶準備賬單時，他意識到有些地方不對勁。當他把自己投入的工時加總起來以後，他意識到律所要求這名客戶爲一個月的服務支付相當於他一年薪水的費用。“我開始冥思苦想：這筆錢去了哪裏？”他了解到，除了合夥人的利潤，這筆錢還花在了律所牆壁上掛的藝術品上。

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.

他說，不僅是客戶對這種體制不滿，許多初級律師也同樣如此。“他們感到自己被壓榨得太狠、薪資太低、不受重視，”他說。2000年，他和一個朋友創建了Axiom，爲企業提供更爲便宜的法律服務，通過讓律師在客戶的場所、家中或者Axiom公司類似倉庫一樣的辦公室裏工作來節省辦公成本。這些年來，Axiom在服務客戶過程中增多了對技術的使用。

Scaling up

規模效應

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.

一些人用優步來解釋法律業如何正在被顛覆，但哈里斯更願意談談飛機是如何造出來的。奧維爾(Orville)和威爾伯•萊特(Wilbur Wright)兄弟是打造飛行器的手工藝人。今天的飛機不是由手工藝人，而是由以空客(Airbus)和波音(Boeing)爲首的工業製造商製造出來的。

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.”

他說，法律業依然處於手工藝人的階段。律師們爲客戶打造個性化的意見。降低成本的方法是將這個過程的大部分工業化。Axiom提供的服務包括管理客戶的合同。“我們拿到客戶所有的既往文件，將這些信息結構化。這項技術的核心是一個能將協議內部和不同協議之間的信息連接起來的數據模型，”哈里斯表示，“我們可能會查看續約日期和交叉銷售機會。”

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.

一些產品旨在幫助企業內部法務部門更有效率地管理他們的工作。位於英國西北部的公司Riverview Law推出了名爲“虛擬助手”的系統。企業內部的法務顧問能夠使用這些系統，在一個數字“儀表盤”上確認出現問題的部分、任何案件的風險狀況、誰在處理該案、以及處理者所花的時間。

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首席執行官卡爾•查普曼(Karl Chapman)是一名法學院畢業生，但他並沒有律師執業經驗。曾有過人力資源和招聘服務方面從業經歷的他表示，從工作成本到工作時長，律師和企業內部法務部門對與自己工作相關的信息掌握得太少。“這個市場上數據的匱乏實在令人驚訝。零售商和其他企業都擁有真實的數據並根據這些數據進行決策，”他說。

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.

和其他行業目前的情況相比，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認爲，這些技術能夠遠遠超越將日常例行程序數字化，完成律師們認爲只有他們能夠做的複雜工作。

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.”

那麼法律業也在接近其“優步時刻”嗎？一些人對這個想法嗤之以鼻。“我入律師這一行以來人們就一直在談論這個，”一名紐約的律師表示，“只有等親眼看見我纔會相信。”

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頂層人物沒有多少動力去改變。這個體系對他們很有利。“大多數人工作了20年纔到達這個行業的頂端，現在他們在大把賺取服務費，”Axiom的哈里斯說。作爲合夥人，他們把利潤分給彼此，幾乎沒有動力投資新技術。在他們看來，一家美國律所的營銷主管表示，“事情沒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.

還有其他有利於傳統法律業的因素在起作用。自2007年金融危機以來，監管力度加大。害怕犯錯的企業會繼續在法律服務上花錢。在它們進入新市場時尤其如此。

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.”

德同的全球主席喬•安德魯(Joe Andrew)表示，存在“恐懼因素”。“人們總是願意在未知事物上花錢。你進入新市場，那裏有新的風險。（有）品牌受損（的危險）。首席執行官們會因爲這種事情遭到解僱。”

The customer knows best

客戶最懂行

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.

但企業客戶正在要求改變。查普曼表示，不斷上升的法律費用讓現有體系難以爲繼。“客戶開始造反，”他說。

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，許多企業內部法務部門已經削減了成本。馬丁提及沃達豐和其律師就固定服務費（而不是接受按小時計費）進行的談判。這家電信公司還將合作律所從70所降至10所。馬丁相信，技術能幫助企業法務部門進一步削減成本。“我對法律科技非常有信心，”她說。

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”.

在他們的書中，薩斯坎德父子引用了20世紀前半葉的政治理論家、英國工黨(Labour party)活動人士哈羅德•拉斯基(Harold Laski)的話，拉斯基曾說，專家享有的地位“和原始社會中祭司的地位沒有多大區別”，行使“外行無法參與的祕術”。

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.

長期以來，律師們一直扮演着這樣的角色，其中許多人還會繼續扮演。對知名顧問的需求很可能將永遠存在，尤其是對企業來說。但對那些無力支付法律諮詢費用的人來說，科技帶來了一些希望。雖然還有很長的路要走，但馬丁主張，如果新應用能夠取得成功，它們將給這個行業帶來巨大的回報。

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.”

加大對科技的運用不僅會降低法律服務的成本，還會去除它身上的一些神祕色彩。她說，目的應該是“讓企業和個人能夠自行完成更多的法律工作。（這樣）法律看起來就不會那麼特殊了”。