The 80/20 Principle

I’ve been wearing two AI recorders. Only one belongs near a client.

Ernie the Attorney — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 16:55:05 GMT

I’ve been wearing two AI recording devices side by side to see which one earns a permanent spot.

The Plaud is a meeting recorder. You start it, it captures audio, you get a transcript and a summary. The Fieldy is a small disc you wear on a lanyard or a wrist strap, and it’s always on. It tries to figure out on its own when a new conversation has started, and a double-click forces a fresh session when it guesses wrong.

Both are useful. Then I went looking at how each one handles your data, and it stopped being a close call.

The Fieldy’s most interesting feature is something it doesn’t do

It never keeps the audio. It streams what it hears, generates a rough transcript, and throws the recording away. I’d assumed this was true and wanted to verify it — turns out ElevenLabs, whose speech-to-text service powers the Fieldy, says the same thing in its own write-up: the platform never stores audio, it only processes it.

There’s a real argument that this makes the Fieldy the safer device for a lawyer. A Plaud recording of a client conversation is a durable audio file. It’s discoverable. It can be subpoenaed in a fee dispute or a malpractice claim, and it captures every hedge and half-finished thought you had that afternoon. The Fieldy leaves nothing to produce.

I found that argument more persuasive than I expected to. It still doesn’t get me there, and here’s why.

The marketing doesn’t match the privacy policy

Fieldy’s homepage says your data is “encrypted end-to-end” and that the product is HIPAA-compliant. Fieldy’s own privacy policy names ElevenLabs and OpenAI as processors — which is hard to square with end-to-end encryption, since your audio has to be readable for someone else to transcribe it. And the policy itself contains no HIPAA provisions at all. I couldn’t find a business associate agreement or anything resembling a data processing agreement.

Plaud publishes SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, and ISO 27701, tells you your data sits in AWS Oregon by default, and lets a team plan pick its region. That’s a vendor you can do diligence on.

The ethics question outranks both devices

In December, the New York City Bar issued Formal Opinion 2025-6, on lawyers using AI to record, transcribe, and summarize client conversations. The holding worth knowing: you need client consent first, and that’s true even in a one-party consent state. Recording a client without telling them is deception under Rule 8.4, regardless of what your state’s wiretap statute permits.

Then layer on the statutes. Around a dozen states require all-party consent, and Florida — where I live — is on every version of that list.

Here’s the part that sinks the Fieldy for client work, and it has nothing to do with Fieldy’s engineering. An always-on device picks up the person at the next table, opposing counsel in a hallway, and the client conversation you never decided to record. Destroying the audio afterward doesn’t fix a consent problem. The risk isn’t what gets stored. It’s what gets captured.

Plaud answered a question I’d been asking

I’d wondered whether the Fieldy would pressure Plaud into making its NotePin always-on. The opposite happened. At CES in January, Plaud’s new NotePin S added a physical button, including a tap to flag a moment you’ll want to find later. A firmware update before that specifically reworked the button logic to cut down on accidental recordings.

Worth noting where the rest of this category went: Meta bought Limitless in December and stopped selling the Pendant to new customers. Amazon bought Bee last July. If you’re a lawyer, “my always-on listening device is owned by Meta” is a harder sentence to say to a client than it was a year ago.

What I’d recommend

Client meetings, intake, anything that could become a record — use the Plaud. Get consent on the recording itself, in the first ten seconds.
Your own ideas, drives, walks, solo dictation — the Fieldy is great, and cheap. Around $179, and the battery genuinely runs for days.
Take the Fieldy off before client contact. Not muted. Off.
If you’re in an all-party consent state, read your statute before you buy either one. Don’t rely on a chart, including mine — the lists disagree with each other.

Bottom line

The dividing line isn’t precision, and it isn’t price. It’s whether anyone besides you is in the room.

;-)

Ernie

P.S. In the Inner Circle we pull tools apart like this before anyone spends money on them — including the ones that don’t survive the reading.

→

https://ernietheattorney.net/

Walter Isaacson finally got scared about AI

Ernie the Attorney — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 12:03:00 GMT

Walter Isaacson was on CNBC’s Squawk Box this week, and he said something you don’t often hear from him. He’s an AI optimist — he thinks it creates jobs and is genuinely useful. But this, he said, is the first thing that flat-out scared him.

Isaacson is worth a listen on this. He’s spent years around the people building AI — he wrote the biographies of S…

You won’t get replaced. You’ll get skipped.

Ernie the Attorney — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 12:04:06 GMT

Everyone keeps asking whether AI will replace lawyers. It’s the wrong question.

A better one comes from a book written in 1988, long before anyone worried about ChatGPT. The sociologist Andrew Abbott wrote The System of Professions, and his framework explains what’s happening to law right now better than most of the AI commentary you’ll read this year.

Pr…

Your AI-Powered Browser Might Be the Biggest Resource Hog

Ernie the Attorney — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 12:02:59 GMT

A member in my community posted something that sounded like a rant and a cry for help rolled into one. He’s been a fan of Perplexity’s Comet browser for a while. But lately his Mac mini kept running out of memory, and when the force-quit box popped up, Comet was using 10 to 12 GB of RAM — on a machine with 16 GB total.

He asked if anyone else had seen th…

The boring skill that decides how much AI can help you

Ernie the Attorney — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 12:03:22 GMT

I’ve been letting AI work directly with my files lately — reading a whole folder, renaming things, moving documents around, connecting one to another. It’s been useful in ways I didn’t expect. It also showed me something that goes undiscussed, and I think it matters more than most of the advice you hear.

The quiet prerequisite

The people who get the most …

Lawyers are quietly becoming builders

Ernie the Attorney — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 12:02:24 GMT

Bob Ambrogi, the veteran legal tech journalist, just interviewed Mark Pike on his LawNext podcast. Pike is the associate general counsel at Anthropic and the product lead for Claude for Legal, the big legal push the company launched in May.

What stuck with me wasn’t the product news. It was how Pike got there. He came up through Facebook and Slack, and h…

Buy Harvey, or build your own? A smarter way to decide.

Ernie the Attorney — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 12:01:29 GMT

Every AI decision you make is a bet on the future. You just haven’t written the bets down.

That’s the idea behind a thought-provoking Every.to article by Dan Pupius, the CTO at The General Partnership. He argues that people building with AI should make their hidden bets explicit — so they notice sooner when one stops being true.

It’s aimed at startup foun…

A Short Sensible Guide for New Law Students Preview text: Built on the 80/20 principle — plus how to use AI to sharpen your thinking, not dull it.

Ernie the Attorney — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 18:14:53 GMT

I put together a short guide for anyone heading into law school this fall. It’s based on the 80/20 principle (go figure 😏). But it also explains how to use AI in ways that help foster critical thinking, not impair it.

If you know anyone starting law school, feel free to share it. You can download the markdown file here.

;-) Ernie

Why "good enough" is the whole point of 80/20

Ernie the Attorney — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 12:03:30 GMT

Most people love the idea of the 80/20 rule. Do the 20% of the work that gets 80% of the result. Skip the rest.

Then they sit down to actually do it, and they can’t stop. They keep polishing. They keep adding. The thing that should’ve taken an hour takes four.

That’s not the 80/20 rule failing. That’s perfectionism insidiously overriding it.

The extra work…

The fastest way to learn AI is the slowest

Ernie the Attorney — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 13:41:33 GMT

Most AI training aimed at lawyers is shiny-object stuff. That’s exactly why none of it sticks.

You’ve seen the headlines. “Nine prompts that’ll change everything.” “The ultimate AI playbook for your firm.” It might capture attention, but the promise is empty. You wind up wasting time adapting someone else’s prompt to your situation, getting frustrated, a…

You can't learn AI from a list of prompts

Ernie the Attorney — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 12:01:14 GMT

I spent time today with a lawyer in Los Angeles who wanted help with Claude. She had vague ideas about what she wanted to do, so I listened.

After a while, I realized I could help her with one specific thing. Not ten things. One.
We worked on updating a Claude skill together. I showed her the manual way, which is cumbersome, and then a shortcut for doing …

The $8.40 Minute

Ernie the Attorney — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 12:01:31 GMT

Someone in my community recently said that Wispr Flow — the popular AI dictation tool — is overpriced at $15 a month. For his use, he did not think it was worth it.

Then another lawyer in the group replied and reframed the question completely.
He started with a story from his college days. He was studying Industrial Management and spent a summer at the wo…

Lawyers have their own roadmap defense

Ernie the Attorney — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 12:01:58 GMT

An article I read this week argued that AI coding tools have ended the “roadmap defense” in enterprise software. The argument goes like this: for thirty years, vendors rationed what got built. A customer asked for a feature, the vendor said “we’ll consider it for Q3,” and that was that.

AI tools like Claude Code have collapsed the cost of building softw…

The mattress tag school of AI ethics

Ernie the Attorney — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 12:03:53 GMT

Pull a tag off a mattress and you’ll see a warning in stern legal language. Something like: “DO NOT REMOVE UNDER PENALTY OF LAW.”

I’ve never met anyone who was hauled into court over a missing mattress tag. Not a reprimand. Not a fine. Not a stern letter from the Bureau of Bedding.

(Fun detail: that warning is actually aimed at sellers, not buyers. The la…

What my dad the psychoanalyst taught me about AI

Ernie the Attorney — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 12:01:45 GMT

My dad was a psychoanalyst. He spent his career learning to hear what people were actually saying — not just the words, but what lived underneath them.

He told me a story once that stuck with me.

The woman in the waiting room

He walked out of his office one afternoon and found a woman sitting there — not one of his patients. He asked if he could help. She …

The real skill behind good AI prompts is older than computers

Ernie the Attorney — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 12:02:13 GMT

The current AI gospel is simple: context is everything. Give the model enough background, and it produces something useful. Skip the context, and you get something generic.

That’s true. But it skips a step.

Context comes from attention

Giving good context isn’t a prompting skill. It’s a noticing skill.

To give an AI useful context, you have to know what mat…

You don't need all those meetings

Ernie the Attorney — Fri, 29 May 2026 12:01:57 GMT

I’ve worked with Cham, my virtual assistant in the Philippines, for three years. We’ve had maybe three Zoom calls in that entire time.

One was early on — just to put a face to a name. The other two were spread across three years.

That probably sounds wrong to most people. Most people assume that working closely with someone means lots of meetings. Frequen…

Stop writing 600-word client updates

Ernie the Attorney — Tue, 26 May 2026 12:01:38 GMT

The hardest part of switching from long client emails to short videos isn’t the technology. It’s getting over yourself.

A small but growing group of lawyers has stopped writing 600-word client updates and started recording 90-second videos instead. The benefits are real:

Clients actually watch them
You explain complex stuff once, in plain English, with you…

The two tech writers I trust most in the Al age

Ernie the Attorney — Mon, 25 May 2026 12:42:16 GMT

Here’s something you probably haven’t seen in any headline: Anthropic — the company that makes Claude — is paying Google substantial money for compute. That payment is a meaningful chunk of Google Cloud’s recent growth. Part of why Google’s stock is doing well is being driven by selling AI compute to one of its main AI competitors.

I learned this from Be…

Your Firm's Knowledge Is Trapped. A Chatbot Can Let It Out.

Ernie the Attorney — Fri, 22 May 2026 12:01:49 GMT

Every firm has a knowledge problem, even if nobody calls it that.

Precedent briefs sit in a folder on somebody’s laptop. The client intake FAQ lives in an old Word doc. Half of what your firm knows — how you handle a discovery dispute, what you tell a new client about billing, which judge hates late filings — lives in people’s heads or buried email threa…