I’ve been wearing two AI recorders. Only one belongs near a client.
Fieldy and Plaud look like competitors. They’re doing different jobs, and for lawyers the difference isn’t about audio quality.
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.
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