Home Dominion How Most Law Firms Operate How Governance Protects Your Firm Founding Team The Analysis Contact

Dominion by Yavardi

Every engagement starts with a structured assessment of your firm.

The authorization gap looks different at every firm. The Baseline Assessment maps exactly where it lives in yours and what it's costing before a single layer of Dominion is deployed.

The Entry Point

Dominion Baseline Assessment

The Baseline Assessment is a structured governance audit of how authority flows and breaks down across your firm's operations. It is a formal engagement with defined interview paths, evidence collection, and financial attribution at every step.

The assessment runs structured, role-based interviews across five firm roles: Managing Partner, Practice Group Partners, Finance Director, Billing Manager, and IT Director. Every question maps to a failure point in the authorization chain. Every section produces a dollar output. All six section outputs roll into the final Reconstruction Tax figure in the report.

Assessment Methodology

Six sections. Each examines a distinct dimension of authorization failure. Each produces a quantified dollar output built from your firm's own data.

Section 1
Identity State Assessment
Determines whether your identity environment is trustworthy enough to anchor a legally attributable authorization record. An authorization chain is only as defensible as the identity behind it.
Section 2
Environment Boundaries Assessment
Maps every system that touches your matter lifecycle and identifies where authorization events would need to be captured. Determines whether any current system creates an authorization record at the moment of decision.
Section 3
Workflow Reality Assessment
Maps every place authority breaks down during actual matter execution: scope changes, budget overruns, new biller additions, client communication gaps, and time entry patterns. This section produces the largest dollar figure in the report.
Section 4
Authority Gap Analysis
Quantifies the total cost of the authorization gap across all five moments of matter execution: reconstruction frequency and cost, write-down history and pattern, dispute history, institutional knowledge loss, and the compounding loop.
Section 5
Compliance and Audit Exposure
Identifies trust account audit risk, OCG violation history, panel position risk, and AI governance exposure.
Section 6
Change Readiness Assessment
Produces a scored deployment complexity rating. It determines how to structure the Pilot.
What determines scope
Scoped to your firm before engagement begins
Engagement intensity and duration scale with your firm's size, office count, practice area complexity, number of active matters, technology environment, and the depth of the authorization gap identified during scoping. A 40-attorney single-office firm and a 300-attorney multi-office firm with active OCG exposure require fundamentally different engagements.
What you get
A fixed-price engagement with a defined deliverable
Price, scope, and deliverable are defined before the engagement begins. The Governance Report is the standalone deliverable: your Reconstruction Tax figure, your Change Readiness Score, a full authority gap map, and a complete picture of where your firm's authorization infrastructure stands today. The Governance Roadmap follows from the Report. It defines the deployment sequence, the entry layer, and the engagement structure for your specific environment.
The Platform

Three layers. Each one builds on the last.

The Baseline Assessment determines which layers are relevant, in what order, and what each engagement looks like inside your specific environment. Firms enter at the layer the Assessment identifies as the highest-impact starting point. Every layer runs inside the firm's existing technology environment.

Layer I — Dominion Perimeter
Identity and access governance
Establishes the identity foundation that makes every downstream authorization record legally attributable. Covers access lifecycle management, role-based access controls, MFA coverage across all systems attorneys use for matter work, service account governance, and cloud environment hardening. Before an authorization record can be defended in a billing dispute, the identity behind it has to be verifiable. Perimeter is what makes it verifiable. Every engagement that includes Workflow begins here.
↓
Layer II — Dominion Workflow
Authorization captured at the moment of decision
The core governance layer. When scope expands, budget is exceeded, or a change needs client communication, the responsible attorney triggers a structured approval through Outlook, Teams, or Slack — tools they already use. Dominion captures the scope of the decision, the cost impact, who approved it, and when, before work continues. Every approval produces a permanent, identity-verified, timestamped record inside the firm's own infrastructure. The matter ledger dashboard gives billing coordinators real-time visibility into authorization status and budget variance across every active matter.
Dominion · Matter Ledger Dashboard
Dominion
Workflow Governance
Hargrove & Tillman LLP
Billing
Matter Ledger
Pending Approvals
Reports
Matter Ledger
All active matters — authorization status and budget variance — June 2026
Active Matters
8
Total Authorized
$4.2M
Pending Approvals
2
Matter
Authorized
Budget
Consumed
Status
Meridian Advanced Mfg. v. Apex Sensor
HTL-2026-0047
$2,799,200
$3,800,000
73.7%
Authorized
Castellan Properties v. Pinnacle Build
HTL-2026-0051
$245,500
$650,000
37.8%
Pending
Novarra Health Systems v. Atlas Industrial
HTL-2026-0038
$260,400
$900,000
28.9%
Authorized
Sterling Acquisition — EPA Remediation
HTL-2026-0044
$498,700
$550,000
90.7%
Flagged

Dominion matter ledger — billing coordinator view, all active matters in real time

That same visibility extends to client communication. The firm can surface budget position, authorized scope, and matter progress to clients at any point without reconstructing anything. When a client questions a charge, the record of what was approved, when it was approved, and what the scope change entailed is immediately available. This is where the primary source of the Reconstruction Tax is resolved.
↓
Layer III — Dominion Intelligence
Private AI infrastructure inside the firm's own environment
Dominion Intelligence is a private AI layer deployed inside the firm's own infrastructure that surfaces what the firm already knows. Informal policies. How certain motions get drafted in certain jurisdictions. How a partner approaches a specific type of case. Prior work product that exists somewhere in the DMS but cannot be found at execution. That knowledge currently lives in the heads of partners and senior attorneys who have been at the firm for years. When they leave, it leaves with them.

Intelligence captures that knowledge and makes it accessible. A junior associate working a matter can surface how the firm has handled similar situations before, what prior work product exists, and what the established approach is, without having to ask four people and sit through the same conversation that has already happened eight times on that matter.

Law firms are already using AI. They are querying public models with client data, trusting outputs without provenance, and relying on systems that cannot explain where an answer came from. Dominion Intelligence fixes it by design: every answer is drawn from the firm's own governed work product, every output cites its source, and every retrieval stays inside the firm's perimeter.
One Governance Infrastructure Platform

Perimeter governs who and what may exist inside the firm's environment.

Workflow captures the authorization record at the moment decisions are made.

Intelligence surfaces what the firm already knows so that work does not get recreated and conversations do not get repeated.

Together they close the authorization gap from identity through execution through institutional memory.

The Deliverable

What the Governance Report contains

The report is built to be presented to firm leadership to understand the financial case before committing to a governance deployment.

Section 1
Your Reconstruction Tax figure
Calculated from your firm's billing history, write-down patterns, and realization data. Every component is sourced directly from your assessment interviews.
Section 2
Authority gap map
A complete map of every place the authorization chain breaks inside your firm's operations, with the dollar exposure attached to each failure point.
Section 3
Infrastructure map and deployment specification
Every system Dominion would connect to, the integration complexity for each, and the exact technical blueprint for what deployment looks like inside your environment.
Section 4
Risk register and Change Readiness Score
Every deployment risk specific to your environment ranked by severity, with mitigation paths.

Start with the Assessment.

The number the Assessment produces is your firm's actual exposure, built from your data.

Schedule a Conversation Estimate Your Exposure First