Extend Your Firm’s Ethical Walls Into Harvey With iManage
Harvey enforces ethical walls using client matters and policies synced from iManage Security Policy Manager, so lawyers can share and collaborate without a second set of rules to manage.
A team is reviewing agreements for a restricted transaction. The documents live in iManage, in a client matter protected by an ethical wall. Someone syncs the folder into a shared Vault in Harvey and invites a few colleagues to help. For firms that manage ethical walls in iManage, the natural next question is whether those walls carry over into Harvey.
Now they do. Harvey enforces ethical walls using client matters and policies synced from iManage Security Policy Manager (SPM). After an early access period with select customers, this capability is now generally available.
When a firm has set its information barriers, Harvey will respect them throughout the platform, using the policies the firm already maintains, so lawyers can share and collaborate without a second set of rules to manage.
Your Existing Walls, Enforced
Harvey now controls who can access and share content tied to a client matter by checking information barrier and ethical wall policies maintained in iManage Security Policy Manager (“SPM”), including 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 stays as the system of record. Policies are managed there and synced into Harvey, ensuring that secure 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. This eliminates the need for admins to manually check who has access to what.
Walls Enforcement in Practice
Back to the restricted transaction discussed earlier. When the team syncs an iManage workspace into Vault, Harvey automatically applies the relevant client matter and SPM policy. So when someone shares the Vault, Harvey checks each recipient against that 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 with different client matters. Imagine the deal team looking for precedent examples to build their own agreement. If they share the thread, Harvey checks if the recipient is walled off from each matter.
Risk teams can also check how enforcement is working. Harvey’s audit logs record wall membership syncs, space access attempts, and changes to enforcement, so firms can confirm how policies were applied and investigate access over time.
Eversheds Sutherland Brings Walled Matters Into Harvey
Eversheds Sutherland worked with Harvey as a design partner on ethical wall enforcement. During its pilot, the firm's lawyers used Harvey across a range of matters. Walled matters were handled separately: the firm kept them out of Harvey and asked users to share Vaults only with colleagues permissioned on the matter. Ethical wall enforcement let the firm extend Harvey's collaborative features, especially shared Vaults synced from iManage, to those restricted matters too.
Building on the firm’s existing iManage SPM policies, rather than setting up walls separately in Harvey, meant there was one source of truth.
“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.”
Rachel Broquard
Service Excellence Partner, Eversheds Sutherland
The firm’s IT team worked closely with Harvey’s technical team to validate the integration and test real-world scenarios before rollout. With enforcement in place, Eversheds Sutherland brought its previously excluded matters into scope and deployed Harvey firmwide.
“Implementing information barriers within Harvey through our iManage integration gave us the confidence to scale Harvey across the firm without compromising the information governance standards our clients expect.”
Rachel Broquard
Service Excellence Partner, Eversheds Sutherland
Governance That Travels With the Work
A firm’s information barriers are only as strong as the systems that respect them. When the walls maintained in iManage are also enforced on sharing in Harvey, firms can bring more of their matters into AI-powered workflows with a platform-level control, rather than relying on attorney discipline alone.
Ethical wall enforcement with iManage SPM is now available for Harvey customers using iManage. Contact your Harvey representative to confirm availability for your iManage deployment and plan your rollout.
