Corporate and commercial practice doesn’t produce recordings the way litigation does, but it produces plenty of them. Management interviews in due diligence. Client conferences on a live deal. Board and shareholder meetings a client may need to evidence later. Calls with a regulator. Witness interviews once a commercial dispute starts. Each one is only useful once someone has turned it into an accurate record, and on a deal timetable that someone is usually a junior lawyer who should be doing something else. Legal transcription services take that work off the matter team without taking the judgement with it.
What an Australian corporate practice actually records
Due diligence interviews. Sessions with a target’s management, where what was said about a contract, a liability or a key customer matters later, especially if a warranty claim follows.
Client and deal-team conferences. Recorded instruction calls and negotiation debriefs, where an accurate note of what the client asked for is the thing that protects the firm.
Board, AGM and shareholder meetings. Where a client needs a reliable record of what was said, not just what the minutes summarise.
Regulator calls and meetings. Recorded dealings with bodies such as ASIC or the ACCC, where the client’s own account of the conversation needs to be exact.
Restructuring and insolvency. Meetings and interviews where many parties’ positions need to be captured precisely.
Commercial disputes and arbitration. Witness interviews, expert conferences and hearing audio your firm holds, once a deal turns into a dispute.
Why corporate firms send it out
The six-minute unit. Time spent typing up an interview is recorded against the matter or written off. Neither is a good use of a lawyer’s time, and on a fixed-fee deal it simply erodes the margin.
Deal timetables don’t wait. Due diligence runs to a signing date. A week of interviews that nobody has had time to transcribe is a week in which the issues in them can’t be reported.
Consistency across a matter. On a large transaction, the twentieth management interview should come back in the same format, with the same speaker conventions, as the first.
Cost. Philippine delivery runs 40–60% below onshore staffing.
Working with an Australian firm
Time zone. The Philippines is on the same time as Perth and two to three hours behind Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, depending on daylight saving. Recordings sent from the east coast in the morning reach a team already partway through its day.
Your conventions. Transcripts come back in Australian spelling and your firm’s format: speakers named and titled the way you refer to them, verbatim or clean verbatim as the matter needs, with timestamps where you want them.
A managed service. Magellan runs the team, the training and the quality review, and commits to turnaround up front. Every transcript is checked against the audio before it comes back. Where a passage can’t be heard, it’s marked with a timestamp rather than guessed at, so your team can go straight to that point in the recording.
The Privacy Act and confidentiality
Recordings from a corporate matter can hold personal information about executives, employees and counterparties, and they almost always hold information a client considers confidential.
Under APP 8, a firm that sends personal information offshore stays accountable for how the recipient handles it, and section 16C of the Privacy Act 1988 treats a breach by the overseas recipient as a breach by the firm itself. A provider’s privacy policy does not discharge that; the contract does.
At Magellan, every staff member signs a confidentiality agreement, enforceable under Philippine law, before assignment, and access is limited to the team working your account. Magellan operates under ISO 27001, PCI-DSS, and GDPR compliance (see our certifications).
Where transcription stops
Official transcripts. These are working transcripts for your team. Where a court or tribunal requires its own transcript, that comes from the transcription provider it appoints, not from us.
Analysis. Summarising interviews, pulling out the issues for a due diligence report, or digesting a witness’s evidence is legal work, and it stays with your team. For support on litigation matters, see paralegal outsourcing.
Dictation. A partner dictating a letter of advice is a different service: dictation turned into a finished document is part of legal document and word processing.
For Australian court and tribunal work more broadly, see legal transcription for Australian law firms and solicitors. For in-house teams, see legal transcription for corporate legal departments.
Questions corporate firms ask
Can you work to a deal timetable? Turnaround is committed up front and depends on recording length, audio quality, the number of speakers and your volume. On a transaction, tell us the reporting date and we’ll plan the work back from it.
Are the transcripts certified? No. They are working transcripts for your matter team. Official court or tribunal transcripts come from the provider that court or tribunal appoints.
Who at Magellan sees the recordings? Only the team assigned to your account, each of whom has signed a confidentiality agreement before assignment.
If your team has interviews or meetings waiting, the next step is a short conversation about volume, format and how files will be exchanged. Legal transcription services has the full capability list and a quote form.
