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Just Transcribe. Advanced Privacy
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Who it's for

For lawyers. The privileged conversation stays in one place.

Client intake, witness preparation, prison visits, the ten minutes in the corridor after a hearing. All of it worth having in writing. None of it worth a copy on a server you cannot answer for.

  • Use it forClient intake, witness prep, prison visits with no signal, and the attendance note you dictate walking to the car.
  • The argumentA supplier who never receives the recording cannot lose it, cannot be compelled to produce it, and does not need auditing.
  • Not forAnything that has to stand up as an exhibit, or anything the firm must retain. No chain of custody, no archive, no legal hold.
Shelves of leather-bound law reports in a library.
Photo: Iñaki del Olmo / Unsplash

Six moments in a working week

Every one of these is a moment where a lawyer already wishes a recorder was running, and does not start one because of where the file would end up.

Client intake, the first meeting

The first hour with a new client is the densest hour of the file: dates, names, amounts, a chronology that will be re-asked four times over the next year. Notes written at speed quietly become the version everyone relies on afterwards, including where they are wrong.

A recording you can search settles that. It also lets you look at the client instead of at your pad, which in a first meeting is not a small thing.

In the app: record, transcribe afterwards with one of the larger models, then search the full text of every transcript for the date you half remember. Save the client's voice once and later recordings label them automatically.

Witness preparation and proofing

Proofing a witness produces the material you least want on somebody else's server: an untested account, said out loud, in a form nobody has settled yet.

It is also material you want verbatim, because the gap between what the witness said and what you wrote down is the gap you will be cross-examined about.

In the app: use Advanced Privacy for the session. It records once, erases the audio as soon as the text exists, and clears the whole session when you leave the screen, so what survives is the transcript you exported and nothing else.

Prison and hospital visits, where there is no signal

A custody suite is a Faraday cage with vending machines. A cloud app in there gives you a spinning wheel and a file that uploads hours later from a car park, over whichever network happens to be nearest.

Offline is how the app works everywhere, so a custody suite is not a special case for it.

In the app: everything runs on the device, so airplane mode changes nothing at all. The transcript is finished before you are out of the building.

The attendance note, walking to the car

The official transcript arrives weeks later. Your own note of what the judge actually said on the third point is worth having today, especially when it has to reach the client tonight.

Recording the hearing itself is usually forbidden outright. This is about your own dictation afterwards.

In the app: dictate straight into the phone, then let it summarise the recording into key points and action items on the device. Export as PDF or as text with timestamps, into the matter folder.

Internal case conferences

Five lawyers, ninety minutes, four views on strategy and one person taking minutes who therefore contributes least. Speaker labels turn that into a document where you can see who committed to what.

In the app: save each colleague's voice once. From then on transcripts arrive with names already attached, matched on the device against profiles that never leave it.

Audio the client sends you

Clients send audio. A three minute voice note about a deadline, a recording of a meeting they attended, an answerphone message that turns out to matter. Forwarding those to a transcription service is the same problem in a smaller package.

In the app: import wav, mp3, m4a, aiff and more directly, and transcribe locally. Nothing is forwarded anywhere, and the file does not pass through a web uploader on the way.

A transcription vendor is one more party to a privileged conversation

Legal professional privilege protects the conversation between you and your client. It is famously robust and famously easy to undercut by accident. What usually undercuts it is a quiet copy on a machine owned by somebody who is neither your client nor your firm, made without anyone deciding to make it.

A cloud transcription service is that copy. Audio goes up, text comes back, and in between sits a company with logs, backups, subcontractors, a retention schedule and a legal department of its own. None of that is sinister. It is a second address where your client's words live, and an address you cannot answer for.

The usual setup

You record on your phone, the app uploads the file, a model somewhere else turns it into text. The interview now exists in at least three places: your phone, the vendor's storage, and whatever their infrastructure keeps behind that. Deleting your copy does not empty theirs.

If that vendor is ever breached, served or acquired, the question stops being what you did with the recording and becomes what they still had.

What Just Transcribe does instead

The speech model runs on the phone. The audio never leaves it, so there is no vendor in the chain, no transfer, and no processing agreement to chase for a voice memo.

The App Store privacy label reads Data Not Collected. The app opens a connection exactly twice: to download a speech model you choose, and to take the one-off payment. Switch the radios off afterwards and it keeps working.

That is the entire argument and it is deliberately narrow. It does not make your phone secure and it does not make a recording lawful. It removes one party from the chain, which happens to be the party you have the least control over.

Why Just Transcribe rather than the tool the firm already pays for

Plenty of transcription products are excellent. The question here is narrower than best: it is which of them lets you answer, in one sentence, where your client's words currently are.

  • Nothing is uploaded. The model runs on the phone, so there is no transfer, no international transfer question and no sub-processor list to review.
  • No account. Nothing to log into means nothing to be locked out of, no credential shared around a team, and no password reset email that is itself a disclosure.
  • No processing agreement for a voice memo. A supplier who never receives the data is not processing it. One fewer contract, one fewer review, one fewer annual questionnaire.
  • Advanced Privacy. A session that records once, erases the audio the moment the transcript exists, and wipes itself when you leave. For the conversation you want the text of and not the tape.
  • Speaker names, learned on the device. Voice profiles are stored locally, so a four-way conference comes back attributed instead of as a wall of text.
  • Exports that fit a file. Text with speaker labels and timestamps, PDF, SRT and VTT. It drops into the matter folder like any other document.
  • One payment. Free download, EUR 9.99 once for the full unlock. No seat licence, no renewal date, nothing for procurement to negotiate.
A supplier who never receives the recording cannot lose it, cannot be compelled to produce it, and does not need to be audited about it. Everything else on this page follows from that sentence.

What the professional rules actually ask

None of this is advice and none of it is specific to your jurisdiction. It is the shape of the question bar regulators have been asking about technology for the last decade, put next to what this app does.

General principles, not a compliance claim. Check your own regulator and your firm's policy before changing how you work.
Confidentiality of client informationMost codes ask for reasonable efforts to prevent unauthorised disclosure, not for perfection; the American Bar Association's Model Rule 1.6(c) is the best known wording of it. Fewer copies in fewer hands is the cheapest reasonable effort available.
Technological competenceSince 2012 the ABA's comment to Rule 1.1 has included keeping up with the benefits and risks of relevant technology, and other regulators have followed. Knowing whether your transcription tool uploads is that sort of question.
Supervision of suppliersWhere a supplier does receive client data you are generally expected to have vetted them and to hold a contract. Picking a tool that receives nothing removes the obligation rather than satisfying it.
GDPR, in EuropeNo transfer to a processor means no Article 28 agreement for this step and no Chapter V transfer question. Data minimisation under Article 5(1)(c) is satisfied by not making the second copy at all.
Recording another personRegulated separately and very differently. Some places require every party's consent, some only one, and some forbid recording particular proceedings outright. This one is on you, not on the app.
Disclosure and retentionA transcript in your possession is a document like any other and may be disclosable or subject to a legal hold. Storing it locally changes where it lives, not whether it exists.

Sources for what the app does are on the fact sheet. Sources for what your regulator requires are your regulator.

What to say before you press record
I am going to record this so that my note is accurate. It stays on this phone, it is not sent to any company, and the phone turns it into text by itself. I delete the audio once I have the text. If you would rather I did not, I will write by hand instead.

Then put in the file that you said it and what they answered. A recording nobody was told about is worth less than the note you would have written anyway.

Fifteen minutes, once

The app works out of the box. These are the four things worth deciding before the first client meeting rather than during it.

  1. Download a model on the office wifi. Twenty-one speech models, from around 75 MB for the smallest to around 7 GB for the largest, and four questions in the app to point at the right one. Bigger is more accurate and slower. You download it once and it works offline forever after.
  2. Decide which conversations get Advanced Privacy. The ordinary mode keeps the recording so you can replay it. Advanced Privacy erases the audio as soon as the text exists and clears the session when you leave. Privileged conversations are the obvious candidate.
  3. Save the voices you hear every week. Colleagues, your own, the opponent you meet monthly. One saved profile each and every later transcript arrives with names on it. The profiles stay on the device and are never uploaded.
  4. Agree how transcripts reach the matter file. Export as PDF or as text with timestamps and speaker labels, then file it the way you file everything else. Settle the naming convention once, before three of them appear.

One step that is not optional: a passcode, Face ID, and whatever your firm's mobile device policy says about encryption and remote wipe. Keeping the audio on the device makes the device the weak point. It is a better weak point than a stranger's data centre, but it is now yours to defend.

Where Just Transcribe is the wrong tool for a law firm

Six of them. If any one is your requirement, buy something else and do not feel bad about it.

  • Not a court reporter. Transcription runs after the recording, not live, and there is no certified transcript at the end of it.
  • No chain of custody. No evidential hashing, no tamper-evident log, no audit trail. For material that has to stand up as an exhibit, use a forensic provider.
  • No shared workspace. Nothing syncs between devices and there is no team library. Six people on one matter means six phones and six separate sets of files.
  • No archive, retention policy or legal hold. The app stores files on one device. If the firm needs a system of record with retention rules, this is not it and does not pretend to be.
  • No recovery. There is no server, so there is no backup on our side. A lost phone with no device backup is a lost transcript.
  • No Windows version. It runs on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Android, and the Mac app needs macOS 26 or later. A firm that works on Windows is better served by another tool.

What survives those six is narrow and useful: a recorder and transcriber for conversations you would otherwise not have recorded at all.

Straight answers

Does using this satisfy my confidentiality obligations?

No app can do that for you, and anyone claiming theirs does is selling. What it removes is one specific risk: a third party holding a copy of a privileged conversation. Device security, consent, file naming, retention and supervision all stay with you. What you get is one fewer thing to get wrong, not zero things.

Do I need a data processing agreement with The Dutch Logic Co.?

For the transcription itself there is nothing to process. The audio and the text never reach us, because we do not run a server that touches your content. Apple handles the purchase and is the party there. If procurement asks anyway, the App Store privacy label reads Data Not Collected and the detail sits on the fact sheet.

Can I record a hearing or a police interview with it?

Almost certainly not, and that has nothing to do with this app. Courts and custody suites usually prohibit recording outright, and a tool that works offline does not make a prohibited recording lawful. Use it for your own preparation, your own dictation, and conversations where you have the right to record.

How accurate is it on legal vocabulary?

Good on ordinary speech in fifty-nine languages, and ordinary speech is most of an interview. It is a general speech model rather than a legal one, so case names, Latin and unusual proper nouns will need correcting. The editor has find and replace for that, and speakers can be renamed after the fact.

What happens if I lose the phone?

The same as losing a notebook, with better locks. Files sit in the app's private storage on an encrypted device behind your passcode and Face ID, and Advanced Privacy sessions have already erased their audio. There is no copy on our side to recover, which is the trade you made deliberately. Keep an encrypted device backup if your firm allows one.

Can two people in the firm share a transcript?

Only by exporting it and sending it the way you already send documents. There is no sync, no shared folder, no team account. That is a real limitation and for a six-person matter team it may well be the deciding one.

Next

The app is a free download and the two smallest models are free forever, so you can test the offline claim on a recording that does not matter before trusting it with one that does. Put the phone in airplane mode and watch it finish anyway.

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Or first: How Advanced Privacy works · The full fact sheet

Nine other jobs

Written by the developer, and not legal advice. I make Just Transcribe, so this page is an argument for my own app. Privilege, disclosure duties and the rules on recording another person differ by jurisdiction and by bar, and your regulator's guidance beats anything written here. What the app actually does is checkable on the fact sheet.

Written 26 September 2026, updated 3 October 2026 for Just Transcribe 1.36. Numbers and sources on the fact sheet.