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 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 — by then the recording has already happened.
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.
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 $129-$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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https://ernietheattorney.net/