Plaud for lawyers in Australia: consent, confidentiality and the file

What Plaud is, and what it sells in Australia

Plaud makes small hardware recorders paired with a phone app, a web app and a desktop app. The device records audio. The app then sends the recording off to be transcribed and summarised. Plaud's Australian site lists four devices, as at October 2026.

Every device includes the free Starter plan: 300 transcription minutes a month. Paid plans are listed on Plaud's Australian site, where the store prices are in Australian dollars. Pro gives 1,200 minutes a month for $39.99 a month, or $194.99 a year. Unlimited is $49.99 a month, or $399.99 a year. A Team plan adds central billing, seat and device management, and what Plaud calls workspace-level data residency. It is listed at $50 per user per month, tax included, as a launch offer, with a higher price to follow.

What Plaud does well for a law practice

• In-person conferences. Most AI note takers only work on Zoom or Teams. A Plaud on the table captures a client conference, a site inspection or a meeting at court, where no meeting software is running.
• No bot in the meeting. Nothing joins the call as a participant. For online meetings, Plaud says its desktop app captures the meeting directly without a meeting bot.
• A full transcript with speaker labels. Plaud lists transcription in 112 languages, custom vocabulary with a built-in legal glossary, and speaker labelling.
• Legal summary templates. Plaud's legal page lists templates for client intake, deposition summary, case strategy, client status update and settlement notes. You can also describe your own template or photograph an example.
• It records offline. The audio is captured on the device, which holds 64 GB, and moves to your phone later.

If most of your client contact is face to face and you want a verbatim record you can search later, Plaud suits that work well. The questions below are the ones a solicitor has to answer for any recording tool. They are not special to Plaud.

Consent: a Plaud is a listening device

Nothing on a Plaud tells the other person they are being recorded. There is no beep and no announcement. Under the state and territory Acts it is a listening device, and the rules for recording a private conversation you are part of differ by jurisdiction.

• New South Wales, Tasmania and the ACT. Recording a private conversation you are a party to is an offence unless all principal parties consent, or an exception applies: the recording is reasonably necessary to protect your lawful interests, or it is not made for the purpose of communicating or publishing the conversation to people who were not parties (Surveillance Devices Act 2007 (NSW) s 7(3); Listening Devices Act 1991 (Tas) s 5(3); Listening Devices Act 1992 (ACT) s 4(3)). The ACT words the first exception differently: you must consider the recording necessary, on reasonable grounds, to protect your lawful interests.
• Western Australia and South Australia. Each principal party must consent unless the recording is reasonably necessary to protect your lawful interests (Surveillance Devices Act 1998 (WA) s 5(3)(c) and (d); Surveillance Devices Act 2016 (SA) s 4(2)(a)). SA also has a public interest exception in s 6.
• Victoria, Queensland and the Northern Territory. The offence only covers conversations you are not a party to (Surveillance Devices Act 1999 (Vic) s 6(1); Invasion of Privacy Act 1971 (Qld) s 43(2)(a); Surveillance Devices Act 2007 (NT) s 11(1)). Passing the recording on is restricted separately (Vic s 11, Qld s 45, NT s 15).

The exceptions matter less to a law practice than they first appear. A recording made so that a transcript can go to a cloud service, onto the file and in front of colleagues is hard to describe as one not made for communicating to anyone else. In Queensland, s 45 restricts a party who recorded a conversation from communicating the record, or a statement prepared from it, outside a list of exceptions. Asking the client and getting a clear yes removes all of these questions in every state. Our guide to recording phone calls with a Plaud has the full state table, and there is wording you can copy. For the wider law see is it legal to record phone calls in Australia, or check one conversation with the free Can I record this call? tool.

Plaud says the same. Its legal page recommends obtaining consent from all parties before recording and checking your jurisdiction's recording laws and professional rules.

Where the audio and transcript go

This is the part to read closely, because Plaud's pages do not all say the same thing. Its legal page says recordings are captured on the device first, with "no cloud processing outside your control". Its AI data usage policy says data is stored locally by default and is not uploaded to any server. Its trust page says all data is transferred to the cloud for processing. We have followed the trust page, because it is the most specific of the three and it is the page Plaud points to for security and compliance questions.

So a recording of a client conference made in Sydney is processed outside Australia, including by US-hosted AI models, even with cloud sync switched off. Plenty of firms use offshore services lawfully. You need to know this before deciding whether your confidentiality and privacy obligations are met, and whether the client should be told.

Confidentiality, privilege and what the law societies say

Rule 9 of the Australian Solicitors' Conduct Rules prohibits disclosing information that is confidential to a client and acquired during the engagement, except as the rule permits. A recorder that hears everything in a conference has wider reach into that information than almost any other tool in the practice.

Queensland Law Society's journal, Proctor, made that point on 9 July 2026 in a piece titled "Why AI note-taking tools are not always safe for law firms to use". It describes choosing a transcription or recording tool as a confidentiality and privacy assessment, and tells practitioners to read the binding terms as well as the website, confirm where data is stored and processed, check whether the provider or any downstream processor trains on, retains or shares the data, and ask for evidence of certification. Its answer to whether practices can use transcription tools is "With care, yes".

The same article points to the joint AI selection and use checklist published in February 2026 by Queensland Law Society with the Law Institute of Victoria and the law societies of South Australia, Western Australia, the ACT, the Northern Territory and Tasmania. Four points in it apply directly to a recorder.

• Jurisdiction. The checklist asks whether client data is stored or processed offshore, and whether that fits Australian Privacy Principle 8 and rule 9. It notes that choosing a vendor that processes all data in Australia avoids the international transfer question.
• Privacy impact assessment. It says one must be done before the system is deployed.
• Client consent. It says that in most cases clients should be informed of AI data sharing, potentially as part of the retainer agreement.
• Privilege. It says the impact of using AI to process privileged communications is not clear, and that using such material to train an AI system is arguably incompatible with keeping it confidential.

On privacy law, Proctor notes that where a provider stores or processes personal information outside Australia, the practice remains accountable under s 16C of the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) for how the overseas recipient handles it. The checklist also lists the Law Society of NSW publication, A Solicitor's Guide to Responsible Use of Artificial Intelligence, among its resources. We cover the privilege question in more depth in does an AI note taker put privilege at risk?.

A checklist before the first client recording

1. Decide which conversations will be recorded. Some firms record intake conferences and nothing else.
2. Add a recording and AI processing clause to the retainer or client care letter, and still ask at the start of each conversation.
3. Record the client's yes on the recording itself and in the attendance note.
4. Read Plaud's terms of service, privacy policy and AI data usage policy for the plan you are on. The Team plan carries the data processing addendum.
5. Leave the training opt-in off. Decide whether Private Cloud Sync stays off.
6. Bind each device to a firm-controlled account. If one is lost, Plaud says only the bound account can decrypt it, and support can unbind it remotely.
7. Set a retention rule for the audio. Once the checked note is on the file, decide whether the recording is kept or deleted, and apply it every time.
8. Write down the assessment. The Proctor article and the checklist both tell you to keep a record of it.

From a Plaud transcript to an attendance note

A transcript is the raw material. An attendance note is the record a later reader can rely on: who attended, what the client instructed, what advice was given, and what happens next. Plaud's own summaries are useful working notes. Whether they match your firm's attendance note format depends on how much time you put into its custom templates.

The other route is to take the transcript out of Plaud. Plaud's site lists TXT, DOCX and SRT among its export formats, plus copy to clipboard. A text file can go into any tool that writes notes from a transcript.

That is where CallNote fits, and it helps to be exact about it. CallNote does not record anything and does not connect to Plaud. It takes a transcript that already exists, pasted in or uploaded as a .txt file, and writes a file note in your firm's format. You can build the template by pasting one of your own past attendance notes. You review the draft, then publish it, which seals and locks the note with an audit trail. The data is hosted in Sydney and is not used to train AI. It cannot fix a recording that should not have been made, and the Plaud side of the process still runs through Plaud's cloud.

For structure and more worked examples, see how to write a legal attendance note and the free attendance note generator.

When Plaud is the right pick, and when a transcript route suits better

• Plaud is the better pick when your client contact is mostly in person, you want a verbatim transcript you can search, and you have worked through consent and the offshore processing question.
• A transcript-only route suits better when your calls already run through Microsoft Teams or a business phone system that produces a transcript. The transcript exists already, nobody carries a device, and the note can be written from it. Once connected, CallNote receives transcripts from Teams, Aircall and Dialpad automatically. See AI note takers that don't record.
• Many firms will use both. Plaud for the conference room, the phone system transcript for calls, and one note format for the file.

For a wider comparison, see the best AI note takers in Australia and what the law societies say about AI note takers.

Common questions