A First Look at the Custody Note App
Custody Note is purpose-built attendance note software for criminal defence solicitors and accredited police station representatives. Here is what you see when you first open it.
Custody Note is Windows desktop software designed from the ground up for one purpose: helping criminal defence solicitors and accredited police station representatives produce accurate, structured, and professional attendance notes at the custody suite.
Why a Dedicated App?
Generic note-taking tools — Word documents, notebooks, or generic apps — require you to impose your own structure every time you start a new note. At 3am in a busy custody suite, that is a problem. Fields get missed, sections run together, and billing information ends up scattered across the document.
Custody Note solves this by providing a fixed, professionally designed structure for every note. Each section of a custody attendance — the reference details, the custody stage, disclosure, consultation, interview, outcome, and fees — has its own dedicated tab. You fill in what you know. The structure is already there.
What the Main Window Shows
When you open Custody Note, the main window is divided into two primary areas:
- The records list — on the left, your saved attendance notes, sorted by date. You can search and filter across all your notes from this panel.
- The note editor — on the right, the structured tabs for the note currently open. Each tab corresponds to a stage of the attendance.
The tabbed editor is the heart of the application. Moving from left to right across the tabs takes you through a complete attendance note in the order you would normally complete one.
Offline by Design
Custody Note does not require an internet connection to function. Every note you create is saved locally on your device, encrypted at rest. You can work at any custody suite regardless of whether the building has reliable Wi-Fi. If cloud sync is enabled, data is pushed when a connection is available — but the app never depends on it.
Who It Is For
Custody Note is designed for criminal defence solicitors and accredited police station representatives working in England and Wales. It is Windows 10 or later (64-bit) software. It is not available for Mac, iOS, or Android.
The structured note format is built around PACE custody suite workflows, including structured sections for disclosure, consultation, interview, and LAA-oriented fee recording.
Note: This article is intended as general information for criminal defence practitioners in England and Wales. It does not constitute legal advice. Solicitors and accredited representatives should exercise their own professional judgment in each case. Law and practice may change; always verify current requirements with primary sources.