DONNA — Decision-Oriented Network Notarisation for Attorneys

How it works

One spoken sentence. Three things happen.

Senior lawyers lose about a day a week to the coordination around the work — arranging inputs, chasing steps, copy-pasting between tools. DONNA takes that part. You keep the judgment.

Step 1 · Speak

You say the intent.

"Send Sarah the M&A precedent from Dubrovnik, ask for a redline by Tuesday, copy Marcus when she replies."

Not transcription. DONNA captures speaker, recipients, constraints, and what "done" means.

Step 2 · Route

DONNA routes it.

To the right person, system, or AI — and back to you when it's done. Connectors, not replacements. The model behind it is swappable; you point it at whatever meets the privilege test.

Step 3 · Sign

The proof is signed.

Every delegated decision becomes a signed record — an IDR — linked to the one before it, like pages in a notary's logbook. Replayable for an auditor or a regulator.

Proof, not promises

Don't take our word for it. Verify it in your own browser.

"Tamper-evident" is the easiest claim in legal tech to make and the hardest to show. So here is the actual primitive DONNA chains to every decision — running live on this page, right now, in your browser. Change one character and watch the fingerprint change completely.

This page carries a real SHA-256 fingerprint of DONNA's own name — the same cryptographic primitive that makes every decision DONNA records tamper-evident. No server. No trust required.

sha256:9f21fe79…ebff499

Want to see a full signed chain — three decisions, each fingerprinted and linked, with a real Ed25519 signature your browser can verify? See the chain in action →

Why this matters now

Where your AI runs is now a privilege question.

Munir [2026] UKUT 81 (IAC) — the leading UK authority to date on AI and privilege — confirmed that pasting privileged material into a public AI tool waives legal professional privilege irrecoverably. The Upper Tribunal was direct about it.

Case · UK

Munir v SSHD [2026] UKUT 81

"To put client letters and decision letters from the Home Office into a public AI tool … is to place this information on the internet in the public domain, and thus to breach client confidentiality and waive legal privilege."

The Tribunal drew an explicit line between public AI platforms and "closed-source AI tools which do not place information in the public domain" — the latter acceptable for exactly these tasks. The supervising solicitor was referred to the SRA; the firm, to the ICO. Self-hosted, audit-chained, never-leaves-the-firm is no longer a sales pitch — it is a practising-certificate question. DONNA is built for it.

Source: caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukut/iac/2026/81

And the regulatory pipeline is converging on the same architectural answer. The EU AI Act binds high-risk-system obligations from 2 August 2026 — Article 13 (transparency), Article 12 (automatic event logging), Article 14 (meaningful human oversight). Each is satisfied as a side effect by an audit chain that signs every delegated decision and replays end-to-end. The deadline is real, and it is close. Get on the alpha before it lands →

What DONNA is

The name is the architecture.

The brand is the verb; the acronym is the explanation. Each letter maps to an engineering primitive — orientation, not interface, is what makes DONNA a different category from Mike, Harvey, or Legora.

Decision

The unit of work is the Decision. Every delegated action produces a structured record — an IDR (Intent Decision Record) — not a chat log buried in someone's history. Who decided, on what evidence, with what confidence: captured at the moment it happened.

Oriented

The architecture orients around Decisions — not documents (like Mike, Harvey, Legora) and not chats (like ChatGPT). The decision itself is the first-class object; documents and conversations are inputs to it.

Network

Two networks at once. A network of language models — DONNA routes between providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Gemini, DeepSeek, Qwen, self-hosted vLLM / Ollama) so the firm is never locked to one vendor. A network of attorneys and matters — decisions preserved across the firm and across firms.

Notarisation

Every delegated decision is signed and linked to the one before it — like a notary's stamp on each page of a logbook. The chain cannot be quietly altered. It replays for audit, for regulators, and for any partner who needs proof of what was decided and when.

(for) Attorneys

The legal vertical, exactly. Attorneys are both the audience DONNA serves and the partners who shape what it becomes. We defer to experienced lawyers to tell us what is missing and to help build it.

Look deeper

Read the work before you commit.

DONNA is alpha and we say so. The roadmap is published, the gaps are named, and the source is open. Three ways in — none of them ask for your email.

3-minute read

The 30-second pitch

The whole idea, in the time it takes to finish a coffee. What DONNA does and why it is a different layer.

Read it →

Diagnostic

Score your firm

Ten questions, one Delegation Power Score, your firm's top two bottlenecks. No email required to see the result.

Take the score →

Source & spec

The open stack

AGPL-3.0 on GitHub, plus the open happi.md audit-envelope protocol any runtime can read and verify.

View on GitHub →

Live demo

See the chain work

Three signed, linked decision records — verified in your browser right now. Change one character anywhere and watch every downstream record break.

Verify it yourself →

Prefer it managed — senior-review tooling, enterprise integrations, white-glove onboarding? That is Chief of Staff Pro, the commercial surface built on DONNA. More on The Fold in the PDF and the 2-minute confidentiality brief.

DONNA — Decision-Oriented Network Notarisation for Attorneys

Be part of the story we write together.

If your firm needs something we have not built yet, tell us. The path is shared — and every alpha email gets a personal reply within 24 hours.

No spam. No card. Concierge reply from the DONNA team.

DONNA probat.

DONNA handles the work around the work.

Get the build and a personal reply.