Legal AI governance: what a firm can check for itself
Governance is not a promise about how careful the software is. It is a set of properties a firm can check. These are the ones Volares is built on, and the ones it does not have.
The argument
Every firm that looks at AI arrives at the same three questions, usually in this order. What can it do without asking? Where does the work go? And what happens to it afterwards?
Those are governance questions, and they share a property worth naming: none of them is answered by a demonstration. A demonstration shows what the software did once, with somebody watching. Governance is about what it can do at all, on the day nobody is.
So the answer has to be structural. Not a setting a partner can turn off, and not a paragraph in a policy document. A property of how the work is built.
The mechanism
Everything a worker can do is a defined action. There is no open instruction to a model that then decides for itself what to touch. The set of actions is fixed, each one is declared, and an action that is not declared cannot be taken.
Each action is classified by whether it can complete on its own. Reading a document already on the matter can. Anything with an effect a firm would want to authorise cannot, and the product does not carry out that second kind at all: it stops and hands the decision back to a person with what they need to answer it.
There is one kind of stop, and it is a question put to a person. That matters more than it sounds. It means what you are reading is a proposal rather than a notification about work already done.
Where the work runs is a separate question with a separate answer. Volares runs in one named AWS region, us-east-1 in N. Virginia, and model inference stays inside the United States. It is the same for every firm.
Your matters and your drafts are not used to train a model, ours or anybody else's. What a firm teaches Volares improves that firm's own drafting, through the Standard it writes, and it goes nowhere else.
Every document can be exported to Word whenever you want it. A firm that decides to stop using Volares leaves with its work in the format it arrived in.
What it does not do
It does not hold any external assurance report, and the security page says which ones in plain words rather than leaving a reader to find out during procurement.
It does not decide. The gate hands back a decision without recommending an answer, because a gate that recommended one would be a slower way of deciding for you.
It does not make a claim about whether a draft is right. The mechanisms above govern what the software can do and where it runs. Whether a particular sentence is correct for a particular matter is a lawyer's judgement, and reading the draft is where that judgement is exercised rather than replaced.