Use case · Legal

Governed external sharing for in-house legal teams

Share contracts, board materials, and matter files with outside counsel and counterparties — without moving documents out of your Microsoft 365 tenant or losing the audit trail.

The problem

External sharing is where legal workflows go off-platform

In-house legal teams run on Microsoft 365 internally — and then drop into email, deal rooms, or file-transfer tools the moment a document leaves the building. The result is fragmented evidence and avoidable risk.

Sensitive matter files end up outside the tenant

Contracts and exhibits get attached to email or uploaded to one-off third-party portals. Once they leave, you lose visibility and control.

Guest accounts and link sprawl in Entra ID

Sharing externally through SharePoint creates guest identities you have to govern. Over time, the directory fills up with stale guests tied to closed matters.

No clear audit trail per recipient

When a counterparty asks who saw what and when, reconstructing it from email plus link analytics is slow and rarely defensible.

Revocation is theoretical

Pulling access after a deal closes — or after counsel changes firms — typically means rotating links and hoping nothing was downloaded.

Where DocLoq fits

A controlled boundary on top of SharePoint

DocLoq sits in front of your SharePoint and OneDrive content. Recipients authenticate, view documents in a protected viewer, and every action is logged in your tenant. Files never copy out. Access is time-bound and revocable in one step. Your existing labels, policies, and Purview integration stay in place.

Outcomes

What changes for the legal operations team

External sharing stops creating tenant guest sprawl

Recipients verify identity without becoming Entra ID guests tied to your directory.

A single audit trail per matter

Who opened what, when, and from where — exportable for the matter file.

Time-bound access by default

Set an expiry that matches the deal timeline and revoke instantly when it changes.

No new place for documents to live

Files stay in SharePoint. There is no second repository to govern, back up, or migrate.

DocLoq replaced three separate ad-hoc workflows we used for outside counsel sharing. We now have one process and one audit log per matter.
Composite illustration based on DocLoq design partners

Illustrative only. Quote anonymised and adapted from feedback during product discovery; not attributable to a specific customer.

See it against your environment

A 30-minute walkthrough mapped to a typical legal workflow — outside counsel sharing, board materials, or matter handover.