Applying AI with Intention

Six Use Cases for Smart Automation and AI in Legal Governance

Legal governance has never been more challenging than it is today. Corporate legal departments and law firms today must adapt to continually evolving regulatory mandates, rapidly rising data volumes, and increasingly complex technology ecosystems. With the need to address those challenges, the promise of AI and automation in legal governance has never been more compelling. But realizing that promise doesn’t start with buzzwords. It starts with intention.

Smart legal teams aren’t asking “Can we use AI?” Instead, they’re asking questions like: “How can I leverage intelligent solutions that deliver measurable value and reduce risk?” This approach to applying AI with intention – to address real business challenges – is where today’s success stories for are coming from, leveraging smart tools and intelligent workflows.

ReVia’s Hive platform, initially built for NetDocuments environments, is designed with a flexible, extensible architecture to support a wide range of legal and enterprise content systems. Across modules like Govern, Insight, Secure, and Transfer, Hive leverages automation and rule-based intelligence to simplify governance, reduce manual burden, and strengthen compliance. In this blog, we’ll discuss six use cases for smart automation and AI in legal governance using Hive.

Six Use Cases for Smart Automation and AI in Legal Governance

Applying AI with intention starts with identifying use cases where the AI and automation provide value. Here are six impactful use cases where smart tools and intelligent workflows through Hive are transforming legal governance:

Automated Workflows and Policy Enforcement

In today’s environments, every click matters, and every mistake can introduce risk. Manual processes are not only inefficient – they also increase the potential for mistakes to happen. As a result, automating governance workflows is no longer a luxury – it’s a necessity to improve efficiency and reduce mistakes. Hive’s Govern and Secure modules offer features like automated policy application, bulk security updates, and event-driven triggers that ensure consistency across the document lifecycle. Automated processes like enforcing retention rules, triggering reclassification based on changes, and auto-applying ethical walls reduce human error while improving compliance responsiveness – leading to greater efficiency and lower risk.

Use it for: bulk provisioning, retention enforcement, access approvals, and real-time policy updates.

Behavioral Analytics and Adoption Tracking

You can’t govern what you can’t see. That’s why Hive Insight focuses on visibility into user behavior, system adoption, and platform health – offering the kind of actionable analytics that fuel data-driven governance. By identifying underutilized workspaces, diagnosing access bottlenecks, and optimizing storage use, Insight delivers the intelligence needed to drive adoption and ensure systems are aligned with how people actually work.

Use it for: adoption monitoring, usage audits, workflow optimization, and strategic IT planning.

Automated Classification and Reclassification

Misfiled documents aren’t just a nuisance – they’re a governance failure waiting to happen and a potential risk to your organization. Hive addresses this issue by providing automated classification logic across its Secure and Govern modules. Whether tagging content with security labels or triggering reclassification when files are misrouted, Hive’s automation ensures that governance rules are applied consistently without requiring user intervention.

Use it for: compliance labeling, retention enforcement, and proactive misclassification prevention.

Intelligent Permissioning and Role-Based Access

Many legacy systems rely on binary access models, i.e., they provide either full admin rights to users or no rights at all. That lack of granular control is a potential security and governance nightmare in large law firms and corporate legal departments. Hive Govern enables precise, rule-based access control tailored by role, matter, and function. With Govern, you can define who can see, edit, or share documents – down to the granular level – without exposing sensitive data or over-permissioning entire teams. This is intelligent permissioning: it behaves like AI by applying conditional logic, but it’s fully auditable and user-controlled.

Use it for: permission segmentation by matter sensitivity, jurisdiction, or team hierarchy.

Smart Security Alerts and Anomaly Detection

Security teams can’t be everywhere at once, and log files don’t alert themselves. That’s why real-time notifications and smart alerting have become essential today for those teams to reduce response times to address critical issues. Hive Secure enables configurable thresholds and real-time alerts for unauthorized access attempts, policy violations, or unusual activity – which expedites action on key risk events. This proactive approach works much like supervised learning systems that detect outliers and escalate intelligently.

Use it for: breach detection, access anomalies, policy enforcement failures, and activity logging.

Smart Filtering for Transfers and Offboarding

Data in motion is data at risk – especially when lawyers leave or join a firm. Hive Transfer provides forward-thinking legal teams with the granular control they need over what gets exported and what stays behind. Preserving structure while reducing the risk of unintentional exposure, Transfer’s advanced filtering rules allow administrators to exclude PII, invoices, or other sensitive terms. This approach combines automation with foresight in an AI-adjacent approach that anticipates governance needs during high-risk transitions.

Use it for: lateral attorney moves, client file transfers, DMS migrations, and secure client offboarding.

Conclusion:

AI and automation may be tools for you to use, but it’s the mindset that determines how successful your organization will be in using those tools. Our approach to automation isn’t about chasing the latest trend – it’s about solving real-world problems with precision, purpose, and compliance at the core. Through automating tasks, enforcing rules, and providing visibility, Hive empowers law firms and legal departments to apply AI principles with intention – enhancing governance without sacrificing control. Want to see how smart automation can transform your DMS? Request a trial to explore how Hive modules can help your team simplify governance, secure sensitive data, and make better decisions – faster.

Request a trial