https://archive.is/wPKhf

The main point raised in the article is that these bots may void attorney client privileges.

But the real danger with these IMO is that they're turning casual conversations into a permanent record, and one that will be completely discoverable in court, should the company get into trouble later.

Back when I was in college, in a fraternity, we always assumed that the phones were tapped. Specifically, we never spoke about alcohol or marijuana (now legal) on the phone.

Even today, I generally assume that my phone could be tapped; even when talking with my trusted work colleagues, friends, and family. I'm extra careful about dirty jokes or "grey morality" in video conferences and email.

The same applies to speaking with lawyers. You never know when some motivated asshole wants to twist your words out of context, and the possibility of a recording just enables that behavior.

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I know enough about security and encryption to know that unless I've exchanged keys physically with someone else, there really is no guarantee that someone hasn't compromised a certificate somewhere. (IE, a "secure" connection on the internet is secure enough for a credit card.)

I think tools like this are needed but the current default of "random SaaS bot joins every call and uploads the whole thing somewhere" feels like the worst possible version of it.

The whole point should be that the people in the meeting can actually focus on the conversation rather than half listening while trying to write down enough notes to remember it later. If you're paying people good money to be in a meeting, having them spend half of it doing low quality note taking is a bit mad.

This is basically the reason I've been building Whistle Enterprise (https://whistle-enterprise.com). I'd much rather have something where I choose to record a meeting, process it locally, generate the document and then decide what to keep or delete. I mean yea, it still creates a record so it doesn't solve the legal / discovery side, but at least you're not also adding a random third party into the middle of every conversation.

How many times have you guys been in a meeting, not realized someone turned on AI notes, and said things you would rather have not been recorded and auto-emailed to everyone after the meeting? For me it's happened more than a few times and while maybe there's a silver lining of people hearing the unvarnished truth, I think it's going to change the dynamics of meetings, in that people are not talking honestly anymore, you have to put on a show for the AI note taker.

Somewhat off-topic: I've spent thousands of pounds on legal advice which has ranged from poor to mediocre. I found that most solicitors would refrain from giving proper advice and are there only to be instructed. You have to do your own homework, read the law, the case-law, prepare notes and documents, etc. With the rise of LLMs I found it easier to do all these things and come prepared to these meetings, or even do some of the solicitor's work on your own. For example I've found Gemini 3 to be exceptional at reasoning on the legal side - to the extent where I was able to explore and reason about very thorny topics from all sides.

I found the legal profession to be a prime candidate to disruption using LLMs, especially the initial consultation phase (Do I have a claim?). One of the things that's protecting the status-quo, for the time being, is the law - for example in the UK you can't actually offer any sort of legal services without being SRA-accredited. There's also lots of secrecy within the profession, and lots of procedural tricks that lay people are not aware of. AI could make all of these more accessible for the lay person.

AI meeting notes are not transcripts. While they do cause an unprecedented amount of record creation (as the article notes), there are also challenges that a defense can use. Note takers get small details wrong all the time, they often are making notes FOR someone so it biases what is documented, their prompting is opaque, and they can't be cross examined. We will likely see situations where the note taker and a witness participating in the meeting disagree?

Some companies want no records at all, see:

"2028 – A Dystopian Story By Jack Ganssle":

http://www.ganssle.com/articles/2028adystopianstory.htm

Known as ’The Rule of 26’, which is sometimes given as a reason NOT to keep engineering notebooks etc. By Federal Rule 26 you are guilty if you did not volunteer the records before they are requested. Including any backups.

From Cornel Law:

LII Federal Rules of Civil Procedure Rule 26. Duty to Disclose; General Provisions Governing Discovery

Rule 26. Duty to Disclose; General Provisions Governing Discovery

(a) Required Disclosures.

(1) Initial Disclosure.

(A) In General. Except as exempted by Rule 26(a)(1)(B) or as otherwise stipulated or ordered by the court, a party must, without awaiting a discovery request, provide to the other parties:

(i) the name and, if known, the address and telephone number of each individual likely to have discoverable information—along with the subjects of that information—that the disclosing party may use to support its claims or defenses, unless the use would be solely for impeachment;

(ii) a copy—or a description by category and location—of all documents, electronically stored information, and tangible things that the disclosing party has in its possession, custody, or control and may use to support its claims or defenses, unless the use would be solely for impeachment; …

https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_26

The main difference between a transcription error and a summarization error is that what was actually said may not get transcribed correctly, but you can always go back to the audio to check. Summarization errors are different because the narrative may sound coherent on the surface but doesn't necessarily represent what actually happened. A coherent summary that isn't accurate may be accepted as fact when in reality it is not. Only if the actual audio is checked would the discrepancies be found.

A lawyer may just accept it, believing the summary accurately represents the transcription. When AI summarizes a meeting, it does not catch the nuances of what actually happened. An offhand or dissenting comment may be critical but not caught in the summary. The AI compresses but can easily miss important details that matter. The consequences of only using the AI summary are potentially catastrophic. Context could be easily misunderstood, critical details may be left out, things that weren't actually said could be accepted as fact.

Honest question:

Do these systems not share data with the AI servers? Or are they all local (on-site, not on-computer)?

I am totally baffled by the trust people put on these systems, sharing with them the most obviously private data.

This is where I think either realtime transcription (or just in time followed by deleting everything) will be an end state.

Especially real-time transcription where the AI actually takes notes (instead of just recording every word and has a dump of it somewhere) can be appealing. Then there isn't any record of the raw sentences, and things that aren't relevant are immediately discarded without any written record.

OpenAI's realtime whisper and other such models will become the default over time.

Why are phone calls or SMS under attorney-client privilege[1] but AI transcripts of a call with an attorney isn't? I was under the impression there isn't any expectation of privacy from phone carriers either. AI's recording of a conversation is actually more like a fourth-party, no?

[1] https://www.findlaw.com/criminal/criminal-legal-help/what-ar...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/09/business/dealbook/ai-note...

I know this is also a legal question, but I sometimes wonder about ML-based meeting transcription and summary services. Pre-ML, if you wanted to record a meeting, the de-facto process (at least in the US) was to announce before the meeting that it was going to be recorded, and then announce once you started recording that it was being recorded. Now that we're in an ML world, the default seems to be transcription and summarization is turned on and none of the meeting attendees are asked and most do not have the ability to turn it off.

That feels hinky to me...

I built https://getminute.me to help solve this issue, transcription, summaries, chapters all done on device using local AI models for Mac OS and iOS.

Seems to have had a good reception so far within the legal world who was my original target market for this.

Is it as powerful as the services using insane compute? No. Does it do a pretty decent job without using a third party? Yes.

In business communication of every kind, voice, text, emails, paper sticky-notes, doesn't matter. Assume someone is sharing your information with someone that you don't know is sharing it. Communicate as if you have an audience at all times. Also, I am not a lawyer, but the error rates are too high for anything transcribed to stand up in court with a good lawyer, unless corroborated by human witnesses.

>> Executives and corporate boards generally expect conversations with their legal team about legal matters to have attorney-client privilege. They lose that protection if they share the same information with outside parties — and it’s possible that an A.I. note taker could have the same effect.

Total oversimplification. The fact is the privilege is a rule totally in the hands of the court. Every time a new communications technology come up, someone shouts about privilege but the courts still accept it. (Telephones, cell phones, emails, IMs, zoom court, each have had their day in the A-C privilege debate and been accepted.) What matters is that the parties intended and expected communications to be privileged.

As an example. I had a crim law prof who had been a NYC public defender in the 70s/80s. She had regularly interviewed clients at Rikers Island. All interviews were listened to by guards and she said you could even pay to get a copy of the recording. But these interviews were still covered by attorney-client privilege. No court would allow such evidence, but that doesn't mean that the prison could not use it for jail safety. Why does this matter: Because the presence of a third party doesn't mean anything. This isn't magic. An eavesdropper does not nullify the spell. Whether something is or is not privileged depends on the rules followed in the local jurisdiction, and no jurisdiction has ever followed a simplistic "presence of a third part" rule.

Until someone demonstrates an example of an AI actually leaking privileged information, courts are going to chalk it up as just another electronic tool for recording communications.

Alternative to archive.is

No Javascript, no CAPTCHA, no geoblocking, no DDoS directed at blog

https://static.nytimes.com/narrated-articles/synthetic/artic...

If I was a lawyer I would worry about auto note takers too. So easy to view something out of context as something totally different from what actually happened. Just my 2 cents

gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/09/business/dealbook/ai-note...

There's some irony how, in an article like this, the phrase "recorders that use A.I. to log live interactions have become a product category." is linked to an article on the best AI note takers...

Attorney here. I'm quite concerned that AI note-taking applications, if used by clients to keep track of conversations and meetings that would otherwise be privileged, might be jeopardizing their rights by doing so. I certainly have been advising clients myself, at least if I know them to be using AI for productivity or otherwise, not to use note-taking or chat tools during calls or meetings, or to discuss anything concerning legal matters with any AI chatbot or agent or tool, because it is all potentially discoverable under the rapidly evolving case law in this area.

Although I definitely think that any alternative approach would be fraught with legal peril, I strongly disagree that this SHOULD be the state of the law. AI note-keeping tools, chatbots, and other AI-generated services are not sentient beings, but most importantly, they are not natural or even artificial persons. The whole principle of waiver in the area of privilege is based on the notion that an otherwise private attorney-client communication, or document created that is covered by the attorney work-product doctrine, has been copied to or shared with a THIRD PARTY. A third party is a party, which at minimum is a legal or natural person -- perhaps a corporation or LLC, but not a computer, dolphin, chimpanzee, or chair. AI note-keeping tools, models, chatbots, etc., are obviously not natural persons (human beings), but they are also not even artificial persons. They cannot sue or be sued, own property, enter judgments or be held liable, or have any legally enforceable obligations. Legally, chatbots have no "standing" or personhood, even of the artificial sort assigned to corporations and LLCs (which, although not human, can sue or be sued, own property, obtain judgments, have legally enforceable obligations, etc.). There simply is no logical theory of waiver due to copying a third party that gets triggered by "conversing" with a chatbot.

The stronger argument I have seen, which Judge Rakoff cited about 6 weeks ago in an SDNY ruling, and that perhaps makes more sense (at least on its face), is to point to the ChatGPT or Claude Terms of Service. Those Terms make the contents of any chat histories between users and the AI service capable of being copied and utilized for training or other purposes. However, those terms of service are also quite similar to the same provisions often found in email and SMS text message providers, and for Zoom, Teams, WhatsApp, and plenty of other channels used by attorneys to communicate with clients. I haven't had the opportunity yet to contrast them, but I would be surprised if the software products routinely used to facilitate attorney-client conversations don't contain substantively similar if not identical provisions to the ones that Judge Rakoff found persuasive to deem privilege waived with respect to client-ChatGPT conversations. I've been trying cases for nearly 20 years across multiple jurisdictions and have never even seen anyone argue, at least not since the dawn of the email era at the very beginning of my career, that attorneys and clients who share privileged communications via email have waived the privilege because of Outlook's or Gmail's terms of service that say that the service can train on the contents of the emails for whatever reasons. In fact, I do recall that argument being made a long time ago, and I can say that it has been squarely rejected out of hand in every jurisdiction and court I have ever appeared. I don't know anyone who would even make such an argument today. (I'll distinguish the different case of an employee suing their employer but using the employer-issued email account to communicate with outside counsel about their employment claims; that scenario really is a waiver because the employee's contract with the employer typically includes a provision that the emails are owned by the employer and may be reviewed by them, which is very different than having an automated Gmail or Outlook script processing metadata or even data from massive numbers of emails.) In every jurisdiction I have ever appeared, the waiver of privilege only arises from copying a third party, not from using email, or text, or Teams, or Zoom, to communicate with a client in a manner that otherwise would be considered privileged but for the medium of communication. It is possible that under particular terms of service, a different result might be warranted, such as if the model also includes terms that say the engineers might read the actual contents of chat histories, but otherwise, the OpenAI or Claude Terms of Service seem like an awfully thin reed upon which to stack the entire weight of this theory of waiver.

This is not legal advice, and no attorney-client relationship is formed; I'm just stating my opinion while indicating that this is not the way I think the law should be headed.

I would be concerned about transcription error perhaps (e.g. non native speaker) where precision matters: engineering, compliance, regulation, legal, etc.

Surprised healthcare isn't called out specifically. AI note takers have exploded in popularity in the US.

Stringer Bell would be furious.

unrealted to the article, but how do you make a page that that prevents the mouse scroll wheel from working? that's pretty impressive.

We turn off the AI note taker for the legal liabilities discussed in the NYT article. But we've also found its accuracy bad enough to warrant kicking it out, independent of legal issues. We have simultaneous participants from USA, India, France, Israel, and Estonia. Some have heavy accents (English is the meeting language). No problem for the humans, but the AI just can't cope (yet).

Many employers prohobit them by policy.

It’s hard when you’re no longer in control. Thanks AI!

Paywall: can anyone share what the issue is?

Inaccuracy in meeting minutes?

Leaking private info, re security of notes?

I have never used them (don't trust them to accurately capture what is important in a meeting vs just noting what's mentioned), but the concept seems very useful to me.

Frankly, at the very least any entity that receives any kind of public money and/or benefits, including any and all corporations, should be required as part of their receipt of public money or benefits of any kind, including legal protections, i.e., limited liability, to record ever single conversation anyone has in the executive level where all the horrible decisions are made, the plundering is done, and the current de facto immunity from prosecution for crimes is enjoyed.

If you receive even just limited legal liability protections ... you are receiving a public benefit and you should be required to record every single conversation, including if you involve your personal devices, every single personal conversation you had on your personal devices of any kind, short of reporting accidental contamination.

It seems people are way too ok with all the abuse and criminality of our politicians and executives at all levels and accountability really needs to be reintroduced into the system. Or are we simply going to wait for a coulee more Luigi events and the ruling class then just dropping the mask on the prison system surveillance state they have constructed around even the USA?

But I realize that is probably wishful thinking because it seems we long crossed the threshold of accountability, where the citizens had enough power to actually affect a requirement that all meetings and communications of any and all politicians, bureaucrats, and executives be recorded and even made public in most cases.