Why Legal Holds Fail Without Full Visibility into User Activity

The Visibility Gap 

Most legal teams ask questions such as: Are users editing or deleting held content? Are documents being moved out of protected folders? Can we track every relevant action in real time? Without clear answers, a legal hold strategy is incomplete. Traditional DMS platforms often lack the level of detail needed to monitor user behavior during hold windows, leaving firms exposed. 

Why Traditional Legal Holds Fall Short 

Many document management systems can “flag” content for legal hold, but that’s just the surface. What they often miss is the ability to identify who is exporting sensitive data during a hold, whether held documents are being shared externally, and if third parties are accessing held content. These blind spots can lead to data loss, audit failures, and legal consequences. 

Hive’s Advantage: Visibility + Control 

Hive Discover goes beyond tagging by providing end-to-end visibility into user activity during legal holds. With Hive, compliance and litigation teams can track every user action on held content, identify risky behavior during hold windows, generate audit-ready logs for defensibility, and integrate with Hive Govern and Hive Secure for unified enforcement. This ensures that firms not only know what content is held but also understand what is happening to it. 

Use Cases

Practical applications include detecting edits or deletions on held documents, monitoring downloads by users under investigation, flagging the movement of files out of protected folders, and triggering alerts when held content is accessed externally. These insights enable firms to respond quickly, preserve data more effectively, and defend their processes in court or during regulatory reviews.