Dominus builds some of London's most complex developments. Alaro runs the legal work behind them.
Dominus develops, owns and operates landmark hotels and student housing across London and the UK. As it scaled, the legal work outgrew what any in-house team could carry alone. Alaro learned how each of its busiest functions works and took the whole of that work on, from commercial contracts to the appointments behind entire schemes.
£2.4bn
Family-owned developer, owner & operator
15 yrs
Landmark London hotels & student housing.
Every hotel contract used to land on the General Counsel's desk.
Dominus owns the hotels it builds and runs them under brands such as Marriott and Hilton. As the owner, it has to clear every contract its hotel teams sign, so the assets stay clean enough to sell years down the line. That discipline is Pearl's, the General Counsel: a playbook every contract is read against, commercial sign-off from the right owner internally, the back-and-forth with the other side held to the Dominus standard. As the portfolio grew, so did the volume of contracts carrying that standard.
For the first stretch, Alaro sat inside Pearl's process as a second pair of hands, shadowing how she read a deal, where she pushed and where she let go. Setting it up cost her no time. Across dozens of contracts reviewed without a single error, she handed over more, a first pass at a time, until she had handed over the negotiation itself. Only then did Alaro build the workflow around it. Contracts now go straight to Alaro, which finds the internal owner, checks the deal against the playbook and against Dominus's own risk priorities, and negotiates the counterparty through to signature. Pearl's time goes where her judgment is needed, and nowhere else.
Send the contract straight to Alaro.
Aligns the commercials internally, checks the playbook.
Negotiated with the counterparty, through to signature.
Behind every building is a stack of contracts holding it together.
Raj runs new-site delivery for the landmark developments Dominus is known for, the schemes that turn a listed building or a former exchange into a hotel. Behind each one sits a stack of professional appointments and collateral warranties: the agreements that bind every architect, engineer, contractor and funder to the project. It is high-volume, document-heavy work, and unforgiving, because a single missing warranty can hold up a funding drawdown or a sale years later.
Alaro learned how Dominus had negotiated with each counterparty, then took the appointments and warranties on across the schemes, again at no cost to Raj's time. Then it went further, finding the pattern beneath the twenty-odd consultants who each arrive with their own terms and insurance positions, and rebuilding the process so an entire scheme's appointments move as one. On 123 Judd Street that meant twenty appointments negotiated and executed in a single push. Alaro now runs the legal work behind Dominus's developments end to end, from the first consultant appointment through to the funder's warranty.
Alaro drafts, negotiates and executes
Every appointment, its status, in one place
A custom view, built for him
Two people. Two completely different problems. Two solutions built from scratch.
Alaro charges a fixed fee for the outcome, not by the hour. Every hour it saves is its own, so its incentive to work faster is the same as Dominus's.
It began in January with two people and three contracts, one of them a six-figure deal. From there it spread department by department, each team handing Alaro on to the next. By May more than half of Dominus was instructing Alaro directly: twenty-seven people across seven of the eight departments, from finance and investment to development and the hotels, the CEO and CFO among them. Across forty-nine matters and more than a hundred deliverables, opposite firms like Freshfields and Herbert Smith Freehills, Dominus has flagged not one error.
