Bloomberg:
Get ready for high frequency lawyers

In the future, we will almost certainly design computers to manage our economic interactions for us. Instead of teams of human lawyers drawing up fixed rules on sheets of paper, machines will talk to one another, exercising broad powers to renegotiate deals on the spot.

. . .Thirty years ago, stocks were traded by humans waving sheets of paper in a crowded room in lower Manhattan. Today, they’re traded thousands of times a second, by computer algorithms relying on data sets too big to be comprehended by the human mind. Imagine that same transformation applied to many areas of business.

. . .Instead of high-frequency traders, imagine high-frequency lawyers, adjusting contracts to reward contractors appropriately for tiny improvements in efficiency, using sophisticated statistical analysis to figure out whether performance is being driven by outside conditions or by the contractor’s skill and effort. Of course, in this sci-fi vision, the contractor will also be a robot, using equally sophisticated procedures to optimize its payment relative to its cost.