The disclosed technology addresses the need in the art for providing workflow controls to shared content items stored on client devices, and enforcing content item check outs or content item locks for shared content items stored and accessed on client devices. The present technology further includes automatically locking a shared content item that is edited on a client device so that other team members cannot modify the content item. Accordingly, the present technology improves upon existing systems that provide workflow controls such as file check-in and checkout functionality by permitting users to access content items directly from the file system of their client device, and by providing automatic checkout and check-in functionality.