白领也危险了：5个正在被机器人夺走的“高大上”职业

    电子取证律师和律师助理

    在一些大型诉讼中，取证环节可能要涉及几百万页的材料卷宗。审核这些材料历来是律师或律师助理们必须从事的低端工作之一，但现在，已经有新型的软件系统可以从事这项工作了。

    这些系统使用了语法分析和关键词识别技术，在电子邮件、短信、数据库和扫描文件中筛选那些在法庭举证过程中必须提交的证据资料。可以相象，在不久的未来，一台经过法学训练的Watson计算机将有可能构建一套储存了大量案例和判例的系统，它甚至可能会写案情摘要——这种搜索和写作工作一般是由法律事务所的助理等工作人员完成的。

    马丁•福特表示，法律定量分析则是计算机自动化的另一个热点。如今很多律师之所以身价很高，就是因为他们知道采取哪种辩论策略更容易打赢官司，他们也更擅长预测法庭裁决，甚至是一名法官的独特风格。不过密歇根州立大学和南德克萨斯州法学院的研究人员建立的一个统计模型已经能够成功预测美国最高法院71%的判决结果。马丁表示：“这种预测法律后果的能力，可能就是律师最有价值的能力了。”

    E-Discovery Lawyers and Law Firm Associates

    In large lawsuits, the discovery process can involve literally millions of documents. Reviewing such materials was traditionally one of the lower-level tasks lawyers or paralegals could face. But now, new software systems can do the job.

    These systems use syntactic analysis and keyword recognition to comb through emails, texts, databases, and scanned documents to find those that one party in a lawsuit would be obliged to turn over to the other through the legal discovery process. It's also conceivable in the near future that a legally-trained Watson might be able to construct a system with a vast store of cases and precedent and create drafts of briefs -- the sort of research and writing work generally handled by associates in law firms.

    Quantitative legal prediction is another hot point, according to Ford. Lawyers now are highly paid for knowing which arguments are most likely to win a case, assessing past court rulings and even the idiosyncracies of a judge. But researchers at Michigan State University and South Texas College of Law constructed a statistical model that was able to predict the outcome of almost 71 percent of U.S. Supreme Court cases. "That ability to make those predictions [of legal outcomes] is probably the most valuable ones lawyers can do," Martin said.