Digital legal work produces the same legal and financial consequences, yet authority is rarely preserved with the same evidentiary discipline.
When authorization is later questioned, what record of proof exists?
“We are increasingly finding ourselves in the unhappy position of receiving invoices for work that was completely unanticipated… what’s happening now is making budgeting impossible.”Corporate client letter to outside counsel
Corporate legal departments have spent decades building outside counsel guidelines around one question: was this work authorized? When the answer cannot be proven, the invoice gets cut.
Revenue the firm earned and cannot collect because the decision that authorized the work cannot be proven after the fact.
That is the external cost.
Firms absorb a hidden cost: the Reconstruction Tax™
It has two components.
Realization leakage is revenue written down before and after invoices go out because the context behind the work has disappeared and the firm can no longer defend the charge.
Capacity leakage is the time spent reconstructing decisions that were never captured. It generates no revenue and displaces billable work across the entire firm.
Your firm is carrying each of these costs right now. The question is how much.
The authorization decision sits between execution and billing. It determines who approved the work, when it was approved, under what conditions, and against what budget. Yet no system preserves it as a governed record.
Informal authorization is not a legal record of proof. That structural absence is the authorization gap, and a significant portion of write-downs, billing disputes, and reconstruction events trace directly to it.
The authorization gap is a governance problem. Yavardi built the governance infrastructure to close it.
Dominion occupies the ungoverned space between authorization and execution. When scope expands, budget increases, or a deadline shifts, the responsible attorney triggers an approval through Outlook, Teams, or Slack, and Dominion captures who approved it, under what authority and context, and when, before work continues.
Dominion authorization review — captured before work continues
Every consequential decision from matter intake through close lives in the authority ledger. Budget position is visible against authorized scope at any point. When a client questions an invoice, the record exists. When outside counsel guidelines require captured proof of approval, the record exists.
That record is immutable, exportable, and uniquely identified for audit and dispute reference.
Dominion deploys inside the firm’s existing technology environment. The authority ledger lives on infrastructure within the firm’s own walls. No records are stored externally. No data leaves the environment. Every authorization record and every audit export remains under the firm’s control permanently.
For the Firm
For the Client
Clients stay with firms that can prove what was approved.