Rippling vs Firstbase When a Document Review Team Exists for One Case

Contract reviewers hired specifically for a large litigation or investigation matter aren't associates on a career track at the firm, they're brought on for the length of that matter and released when it's done, sometimes within weeks. Treating their equipment the same way you'd treat a new associate's, ordered once and kept for years, misses the actual lifecycle: these laptops need to be provisioned fast, scoped tightly to that one matter's documents, and reclaimed the moment the matter closes.

A firm that hasn't separated "associate onboarding" from "matter staffing" in its own process usually finds out the gap exists when a reviewer's laptop is still active weeks after the case settled.

For associates, paralegals and staff who are employed by the firm year-round and rotate between matters as part of their normal caseload, Rippling's tie between HR, payroll and device enrollment works well, since a new matter assignment is an access-group change on an existing employee, not a new onboarding.

It's a weaker fit for contract reviewers hired through a legal staffing agency or as short-term 1099 contractors for a single matter, because those relationships typically sit outside a payroll-based platform's normal onboarding path.

Firstbase handles the pattern contract review staffing actually creates: get a laptop to someone who isn't a firm employee, scope it to one matter's document set, and reliably get it back when the engagement ends, whether that's in six weeks or six months. Its reclaim tracking matters more here than almost anywhere else, since an unreturned laptop from a departed contract reviewer is also an unaccounted-for copy of privileged documents.

Firms in the business and consumer services category run accounts payable close to 24 days on average¹, which is worth knowing if you're billing device costs back to a client matter and need the lease term to line up with how quickly that matter's invoices get paid.

The moment a matter closes or settles, every laptop that touched its documents needs its local cache of privileged material securely wiped, not just deleted, and every reviewer's access to the matter's document review platform needs to be cut the same day. A laptop that sits in a drawer for a month after a matter closes, still holding a local copy of work product, is a real exposure if it's lost or repurposed before that wipe happens.

What counts as an adequate wipe, and what your ethical obligations are around safeguarding client data on a departed contractor's device, depends on your jurisdiction's bar rules, so confirm the specific standard with your general counsel or ethics counsel rather than assuming a standard factory reset covers it.

The most common mistake is letting a contract reviewer use a personal laptop on a matter's document review platform because provisioning a firm device felt slower than the case's start date allowed. That trades a hardware delay for a much larger problem: privileged documents cached on a device the firm doesn't control and can't remotely wipe when the engagement ends.

The second common mistake is treating reclaim as optional once the matter's billing closes, on the theory that the case is over so it doesn't matter anymore. It matters more at that exact point, because that's when nobody is actively watching what happens to the documents still on that laptop.

Tie the return and wipe of every device used on a matter to the matter's formal close date in your practice management system, the same way you'd track final billing, and name a specific person, usually IT or the assigned paralegal, who confirms the wipe happened before the matter file is archived. A reasonable target is device collection within two weeks of matter close and a confirmed, documented wipe within a week after that.

Without that written trigger, matter close becomes a moment nobody owns, and the laptop question quietly falls through the same gap that swallows most contract staffing loose ends.

A matter-close checklist should cover these points:

• Tie the return and wipe of every device used on a matter to the matter's formal close date in your practice management system.
• Name one specific person, usually IT or the assigned paralegal, who confirms each wipe happened before the matter file is archived.
• Cut every reviewer's access to the document review platform on the same day the matter closes, not weeks later.
• Securely wipe the local cache of privileged material on each laptop rather than simply deleting files from the visible file system.