Papermaking was invented around 105 CE in the Han dynasty by Chinese inventor and politician Cai Lun (蔡伦). Paper vastly facilitated writing, tilting the scales from oral to written communication. For the lawyer-client relationship, legal services platforms can be viewed as playing a comparable role to the one paper plays for the writer and reader. Instead of having to communicate their legal expertise by word of mouth, legal service platforms provide lawyers with a place to write down their expertise and services. For clients these platforms serve as a user-friendly source of information when they seek legal advice.

Legal services platforms in China emerged in the ‘Internet+Law’ and ‘legal e-commerce’ era, the early stages in Chinese legal tech development. They are quite common and fall into two broad categories: online law firms and O2O (online-to-offline) platforms. Online law firms are platforms where a legal expert team provides a range of legal services (often limited to certain practice areas) via the Internet. O2O platforms are “Uber”-style platforms which enable clients to find individual lawyers and individual lawyers to find clients. Both types of legal services platforms may also host a forum where users can ask legal questions, or supply a legal encyclopedia.