Harvey now enforces iManage ethical walls across its legal AI platform

Existing walls, enforced inside Harvey

Harvey says it now controls who can access and share content tied to a client matter by checking the information barrier and ethical wall policies maintained in iManage SPM. That includes who may be cleared for a restricted matter and who is excluded from an otherwise open one.

When enforcement is turned on, those policies govern the Threads, Vaults, Review Tables and Spaces inside Harvey. iManage SPM remains the system of record. Policies are managed there and synced into Harvey, so access to Vaults is governed by SPM.

When a policy changes, Harvey ensures that only users permissioned in iManage have equivalent access to Harvey resources. According to the company, this removes the need for admins to manually check who has access to what.

How enforcement works in practice

Harvey describes a team reviewing agreements for a restricted transaction. The documents sit in an iManage client matter protected by an ethical wall. When the team syncs the iManage workspace into a Vault, Harvey automatically applies the relevant client matter and SPM policy. If someone shares the Vault, Harvey checks each recipient against the wall. A colleague outside the barrier cannot open it until they are permissioned through the firm's usual process.

Users can also run queries over multiple iManage documents that belong to different client matters. If a deal team searches for precedent examples and shares the resulting thread, Harvey checks whether the recipient is walled off from each matter involved.

Risk teams get visibility too. Harvey's audit logs record wall membership syncs, space access attempts and changes to enforcement. Firms can use them to confirm how policies were applied and to investigate access over time.

Eversheds Sutherland as design partner

Eversheds Sutherland worked with Harvey as a design partner on the feature. During its pilot, the firm's lawyers used Harvey across a range of matters, but walled matters were kept out of the platform. Users were asked to share Vaults only with colleagues permissioned on the matter.

With enforcement in place, the firm extended Harvey's collaborative features, especially shared Vaults synced from iManage, to those restricted matters. Because it built on its existing iManage SPM policies instead of setting up walls separately in Harvey, it had one source of truth. Its IT team worked with Harvey's technical team to validate the integration and test real-world scenarios before rollout. The firm then brought its previously excluded matters into scope and deployed Harvey firmwide.

Rachel Broquard, Service Excellence Partner at Eversheds Sutherland, said: "The most significant change is that our lawyers can now sync iManage folders to a Vault, either on a daily schedule or on demand, and collaborate with colleagues using that shared Vault with full confidence that information barriers are being respected."

What it means for firms

Harvey argues that a firm's information barriers are only as strong as the systems that respect them. By enforcing the walls maintained in iManage, firms can bring more of their matters into AI-powered workflows with a platform-level control, rather than relying on attorney discipline alone.

Broquard said the integration gave the firm "the confidence to scale Harvey across the firm without compromising the information governance standards our clients expect."

Ethical wall enforcement with iManage SPM is available to Harvey customers that use iManage. Harvey advises customers to contact their Harvey representative to confirm availability for their iManage deployment and to plan the rollout.