A thin conductive plate in free space is one of the most commonly employed models in the interpretation of transient electromagnetic (TEM) profile data. Despite the fact that such a model ignores the influence of the currents induced in the host medium, it is found to be useful to represent the late-time TEM responses which are not severely affected by the host medium. An iterative linearized inversion scheme is designed that computes the Jacobian matrix from numerical differences by forward computations. Parameter steps are solved using the singular value decomposition and an adaptive damping method. Since the computation of the forward solution for the plate model is fast, the inversion method is suitable for microcomputer environment. The parameters used in the inversion are: strike length, depth extent, x-position, depth of burial, dip angle and conductance. The sensitivity analysis of the Jacobian matrix shows that the parameters that can be resolved from TEM profile data with the greatest accuracy are: the x-position, dip angle, depth of burial and conductance. However, it is possible to obtain reasonably good estimates also for the strike length and depth extent from TEM profile data.