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A.I. note takers are making lawyers nervous

264 points by JumpCrisscross 6mo ago

jgalt212 6mo ago
Stringer Bell would be furious.
vintagedave 6mo ago
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.
- close04 6mo ago
  It's in the viewable text on the page. > A trendy productivity hack, A.I. note takers are capturing every joke and offhand comment in many meetings. They could also potentially waive attorney-client privilege. By now everyone knows that AI notes that aren't curated by a human will catch every silly thing that was said in the meeting while omitting the context of the tone or body language. Something as simple as "yeah, right" has vastly different meanings depending on how it was said. In a different context it's already been established that using AI breaks client attorney privilege [0] and this concern has been raised before by law firms [1][2] or the American Bar Association [3] (you can just hit escape before the paywall loads to see the full content). A judge will have to weigh in on this one too. I don't know what's with the wave of paywalled articles that keep making it to the front page without any workaround included in the submission. Even when you coax the text out of the page source, they're not very insightful to begin with. [0] https://perkinscoie.com/insights/update/federal-court-rules-clients-use-generative-ai-not-privileged https://perkinscoie.com/insights/update/federal-court-rules-... [1] https://www.smithlaw.com/newsroom/publications/the-silent-guest-in-your-meetings-legal-risks-of-ai-note-takers https://www.smithlaw.com/newsroom/publications/the-silent-gu... [2] https://natlawreview.com/article/when-ai-takes-notes-protecting-privilege-privacy-and-professional-obligations https://natlawreview.com/article/when-ai-takes-notes-protect... [3] https://www.americanbar.org/groups/gpsolo/resources/ereport/2025-september/ai-you-confidentiality-risks-meeting-transcription-note-taking-software/ https://www.americanbar.org/groups/gpsolo/resources/ereport/...
  - pjc50 6mo ago
    People opt in to the panopticon and then discover they have no more secrets. I'm surprised lawyers fall for that as well.
    - lukewarm707 6mo ago
      the doofus lawyer probably didn't realise, i wouldn't call it opt in
    - close04 6mo ago
      If a lawyer takes notes and puts them in a computer, or a cloud drive, or send it over email, they are still covered by attorney-client privilege, right? If they use an AI to do it, it's treated more like a third party no longer covered by the same privilege. If there's no court decision on this it only takes a bit of bad assumption to screw up with using AI. To be fair, the attorney-client privilege should be completely technology/medium agnostic. If the intention is to have that info stay between client and attorney, nothing should change this.
  - lukewarm707 6mo ago
    [dead]
  - vintagedave 6mo ago
    > It's in the viewable text on the page. Not for me - there was no viewable text.
- WillAdams 6mo ago
  Reminds me of when I worked for a small shop which had the copier maintenance contract at a local college --- when something went wrong and wasn't properly addressed, my bosses found themselves being held to account with their own words from prior phone calls being quoted back to them verbatim --- which they were mystified by until I explained that the administrators had all come up from the clerical pool and knew shorthand.
- LanceH 6mo ago
  They are saying that it could invalidate attorney client privilege because the transcription could technically be available to an outside party. I suspect what isn't being said by the lawyers is they want to keep attorney client privilege so they can outright lie.
  - keernan 6mo ago
    >they want to keep attorney client privilege so they can outright lie As a trial attorney for over 40 years, that is an incredibly offensive take. Attorney/client privilege is usually litigation related and a prime example of the nature of conversations involve our advising our client of the prospects of prevailing at trial and whether to engage in settlement discussions with money amounts involved. If some day you are sued and you have a conversation with your lawyer about your financial worth as well as how much you are willing to pay to the person suing you - and that information ends up being turned over to the person suing you - you won't be so snide about the importance of attorney client privilege.
- bearjaws 6mo ago
  The main risk is attorney client privilege and it's already been tested in New York, if you transcribe a call you need to turn over the transcriptions and they can subpoena the company doing the transcription for the records if you refuse.
Tistron 6mo ago
https://archive.is/wPKhf https://archive.is/wPKhf
skinfaxi 6mo ago
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/09/business/dealbook/ai-notetakers-legal-risk.html?unlocked_article_code=1.hlA.JNyk.LBxrop4y_CR-&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/09/business/dealbook/ai-note...
burningion 6mo ago
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.
- coffeebeqn 6mo ago
  Plus they are super inaccurate. Gemini gets one of its three bullet subtly or very majorly wrong almost every time. Just a few weeks ago Gemini said we’re rolling out our payment setup in Russia. You know the place where we have 20+ sanctions packages on? We were talking about France in the meeting.
  - pjc50 6mo ago
    Given how financial services can impose silent inexplicable lifetime bans for using the wrong words in the "what is this transaction for" field, I'm wondering at what point the AI automatically reports people for sanctions violation based on its mishearing.
  - operation_moose 6mo ago
    We've found they're surprisingly good if everyone on the call is using a decent headset. The problems start when using conference room audio or someone is on their laptop mic. If they miss a word they never do unintelligible, they just start playing madlibs based on the rest of the sentence. We just went through a round of 100+ (non-sensitive) VoC interviews and they really cut down the workload of compiling all of the feedback. If the audio was a little shaky though, we pretty much had to throw away the transcripts and do them from scratch like we used to.
    - user_7832 6mo ago
      > If they miss a word they never do unintelligible, they just start playing madlibs based on the rest of the sentence. Imo this is the single biggest flaw of LLMs. They're great at a lot of things, but knowing when they're wrong (or don't have enough information to actually work on) is a critical flaw. IMO there's nothing structural about why they shouldn't be able to spot this and correct themselves - I suspect it's a training issue. But presumably bots that infer context/fill in the dots rank better on what people like... at the cost of accuracy.
pfortuny 6mo ago
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.
- dsr_ 6mo ago
  Most services have privacy policies that boil down to: - we promise not to share PII (defined as narrowly as possible) - we promise not to share payment information except with our payment system - if you pay us, we promise not to train LLMs on your data - you agree that everything else can be used for any business purpose, including marketing, intelligence gathering, and "sharing with our 1735 trusted partners".
  - pfortuny 6mo ago
    OK. But those can be "Zukerberg" promises?
- cj 6mo ago
  > I am totally baffled by the trust people put on these systems The average person doesn't care about online privacy.
  - sdellis 6mo ago
    They care, but realize that there is no such thing as privacy anymore. The amount of obsession required to maybe maintain some degree of privacy is not something most people are willing to do.
    - cj 6mo ago
      When the average person thinks about "online privacy" they think about keeping things private from other people. They don't think about keeping their data private from the companies hosting/processing their data.
sandworm101 6mo ago
>> 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.
- hugh-avherald 6mo ago
  It sounds like the prison recordings were compulsory, which is a different kettle-of-fish. The key phrase "if they share" implies voluntary and deliberate action, and is not much of an oversimplification imo. > What matters is that the parties intended and expected communications to be privileged. I would contend that your summary, not theirs, is a oversimplification. Jurisdictions will obviously differ, but privilege does not attach merely because of the intent and beliefs of the lawyer and client.
  - sandworm101 6mo ago
    Well, I try to avoid the R word. The actual legal term would be reasonable intention. Literal expressed intention. ie putting an A-C warning on every email, won't be enough on its own. IMHO we should just assume the R word before every verb in every legal discussion. That is how reality works. These are not spells. If I express that I intend something to be private, then announce it using a megaphone at a basketball game, my intention is no longer reasonable regardless of what magic words I have thrown into my communication. Act like an idiot and a court will treat you like an idiot.
rpaddock 6mo ago
Some companies want no records at all, see: "2028 – A Dystopian Story By Jack Ganssle": http://www.ganssle.com/articles/2028adystopianstory.htm 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 https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_26
- next_xibalba 6mo ago
  See also the OpenAI vs. Musk trial, where Greg Brockman's diary and Sam Altman's texts have taken center stage.
- djoldman 6mo ago
  This was interesting and sent me down a research hole. General conclusion: Corporate litigation is mostly just a series of self-investigations so that both sides can learn what both sides actually know, given that neither side knows much about themselves OR the other side. At the same time both sides are trying to stop the other side from getting the judge to order them to do more investigating.
- kjs3 6mo ago
  Much of my experience with corporate counsel is one of 2 extremes: "keep everything"[1] or "keep nothing". Keep everything, because then you can't be caught out deleting something possibly relevant, which looks very, very bad in court. Keep nothing, because then opposing counsel can't catch you out only keeping things that make you look good in court. [1] There's actually a subset of this, which includes "...until you are legally allowed to delete it, then delete everything". This is driven by regulation (e.g. SOX in the US).
analogpixel 6mo ago
unrealted to the article, but how do you make a page that that prevents the mouse scroll wheel from working? that's pretty impressive.
- bilekas 6mo ago
  It's no impressive, it's scummy hiding news behind a paywal, they simple use some CSS trickery to set the height of the content to the size of your view, so there is nowhere to scroll to.
natebc 6mo ago
gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/09/business/dealbook/ai-notetakers-legal-risk.html?unlocked_article_code=1.hlA.EhDF.CayH8Rwfk_Dm&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/09/business/dealbook/ai-note...
senko 6mo ago
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gwbas1c 6mo ago
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. --- 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.)
- skinfaxi 6mo ago
  > 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. This is horrifying. Why do you feel the necessity to self-censor? What consequences do you anticipate?
  - jkingsman 6mo ago
    Adding on to this question, do you anticipate the same people capable of tapping phones to think less of you for a dirty joke? The people whose opinion of me would lower for something off-color and the people who possess the ability to wiretap me are a disjoint set lol.
    - dnnddidiej 6mo ago
      The point is it would be usable against you, but at the point you are wiretapped and can be used in court all bets are off you are probably in too much trouble may as well tell the joke!
      - jkingsman 6mo ago
chris_explicare 6mo ago
[flagged]
testfoobar 6mo ago
I would be concerned about transcription error perhaps (e.g. non native speaker) where precision matters: engineering, compliance, regulation, legal, etc.
atonse 6mo ago
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.
- JohnBizBiz 6mo ago
  [flagged]
ryanshrott 6mo ago
[dead]
samuelknight 6mo ago
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?
redmaple892 6mo ago
Surprised healthcare isn't called out specifically. AI note takers have exploded in popularity in the US.
bottlepalm 6mo ago
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.
- AstroBen 6mo ago
  It's not just work meetings. This is being taken to healthcare settings, also.
  - bottlepalm 6mo ago
    That's fine with me actually. I recently had an appointment where the doctor asked if he could use AI notes, I said yes, and meeting was so much nicer than before when the doctor is typing half the time. We can have a real conversation, nothing I say is missed, and later on the doctor can use AI to cross reference results or whatever else with our past discussions. That's win-win all around.
    - rationalist 6mo ago
      The cases I've heard of where AI doctor notes went badly, is in recording numbers that another doctor relies upon. If it's just a casual conversation, it's probably okay. If it's about cancer treatments, maybe ask for manual notes. I've had doctors write horribly-incorrect notes in my digital chart after appointments, so please don't think I'm trying to be a Luddite.
RobotToaster 6mo ago
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...
1vuio0pswjnm7 6mo ago
Alternative to archive.is No Javascript, no CAPTCHA, no geoblocking, no DDoS directed at blog https://static.nytimes.com/narrated-articles/synthetic/article-426bd9b8-90cd-5839-bd2d-b44c456e82db/job-1778357709215/article-426bd9b8-90cd-5839-bd2d-b44c456e82db-job-1778357709215.mp3 https://static.nytimes.com/narrated-articles/synthetic/artic...
- swyx 6mo ago
  you forgot to mention it requires 13 minutes of audio listening
  - anigbrowl 6mo ago
    There's an AI to do that for you
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6mo ago
  Alternative to archive.is Works where archive.is is blocked Text-only, no DDoS directed at blog view-source:https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/09/business/dealbook/ai-notetakers-legal-risk.html Save as 1.htm Something like egrep -o "(\"text\":\"[^\"]+)|(\"textAlign\":\"LEFT\")|(\"url\":\"[^\"]+)|(\"__typename\":\"TextInline\")" 1.htm \ |sed '/\"url\":\"/{s/??.*//;s/$/\">/;s/.\{7\}/<a href=\"/;}; /\"__typename\":\"TextInline\"/{s/\"$/<\/a>/;s/.\{24\}//;}; s/\"textAlign\":\"LEFT\"/<p>/g;/\"text\":\"/s/.\{8\}//' \ |sed '1s/^/<meta charset=utf-8><meta name=viewport content=width=device-width>/' > 2.htm rm 1.htm firefox ./2.htm NB. Javascript and CSS interpreters are needed only for Datadome challenge. The following DNS data, e.g., A RRs, are required ct.captcha-delivery.com geo.captcha-delivery.com www.nytimes.com g1.nyt.com No other DNS data is required
  - JacobKfromIRC 6mo ago
    Cool! Would you be willing to license this code as GPL-3.0-or-later, or some other free license? I'd like to include a JavaScript derivative of this for Haketilo (a userscript manager). I would add it to a collection of scripts that aim to replace proprietary JavaScript here: https://codeberg.org/JacobK/unfinished-site-fixes/ https://codeberg.org/JacobK/unfinished-site-fixes/
roysting 6mo ago
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.
properbrew 6mo ago
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 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.
- cjohnson318 6mo ago
  100% I picked up shorthand to take notes quicker, but I'm still half-in/half-out of the conversation, mentally deciding what's important enough to jot down. This sounds like a great solution.
tbagman 6mo ago
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...
- SVI 6mo ago
  It certainly has a chilling effect. Meetings where there are robust discussions may become a thing of the past.
runfreeapps 6mo ago
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.
- doctorpangloss 6mo ago
  you are talking management level intelligence to a very Individual Contributor crowd. People will nuke every opportunity presented to them in their life in defense of NDAs that don't matter - better called Not Doing Anythings.
trunkiedozer 6mo ago
It’s hard when you’re no longer in control. Thanks AI!
simonreiff 6mo ago
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.
ryanmcdonough 6mo ago
I built https://getminute.me 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.
fwbruno 6mo ago
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.
ridgeguy 6mo ago
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).
arboles 6mo ago
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-are-the-limits-of-attorney-client-privilege.html#:~:text=Privileged%20attorney%2Dclient%20communications%20include https://www.findlaw.com/criminal/criminal-legal-help/what-ar...
prima-facie 6mo ago
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.
- gib444 6mo ago
  IANAL How can AI learn the secret procedural tricks? Where's the training data? And is there a legal consequence for AI giving bad/incorrect legal advice? Can they get disbarred? Can you be sure the AI tool even read an entire piece of legislation (inb4 "you can't with lawyers either" : I thought we're aiming for better)? How will they understand the inner workings of courts, CPS etc? How will they network with other lawyers for advice and learning (how will the LLM train on that)?
  - prima-facie 6mo ago
    > And is there a legal consequence for AI giving bad/incorrect legal advice? Can they get disbarred? Of course not :) but unfortunately I've received half-truths and outright lies from actual solicitors, while AI has mostly given reliable advice, even if not procedurally perfect. There's lots of guarding and unwritten rules in the legal profession so this is not something that will be straightforward to train on, but once done, even if imperfect, will bring legal access to the masses.
josefritzishere 6mo ago
Many employers prohobit them by policy.
lacymorrow 6mo ago
[flagged]
noashavit 6mo ago
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
theuniverseson 6mo ago
[flagged]

264 points by JumpCrisscross 6mo ago

Stringer Bell would be furious.

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.

close04 6mo ago
It's in the viewable text on the page. > A trendy productivity hack, A.I. note takers are capturing every joke and offhand comment in many meetings. They could also potentially waive attorney-client privilege. By now everyone knows that AI notes that aren't curated by a human will catch every silly thing that was said in the meeting while omitting the context of the tone or body language. Something as simple as "yeah, right" has vastly different meanings depending on how it was said. In a different context it's already been established that using AI breaks client attorney privilege [0] and this concern has been raised before by law firms [1][2] or the American Bar Association [3] (you can just hit escape before the paywall loads to see the full content). A judge will have to weigh in on this one too. I don't know what's with the wave of paywalled articles that keep making it to the front page without any workaround included in the submission. Even when you coax the text out of the page source, they're not very insightful to begin with. [0] https://perkinscoie.com/insights/update/federal-court-rules-clients-use-generative-ai-not-privileged https://perkinscoie.com/insights/update/federal-court-rules-... [1] https://www.smithlaw.com/newsroom/publications/the-silent-guest-in-your-meetings-legal-risks-of-ai-note-takers https://www.smithlaw.com/newsroom/publications/the-silent-gu... [2] https://natlawreview.com/article/when-ai-takes-notes-protecting-privilege-privacy-and-professional-obligations https://natlawreview.com/article/when-ai-takes-notes-protect... [3] https://www.americanbar.org/groups/gpsolo/resources/ereport/2025-september/ai-you-confidentiality-risks-meeting-transcription-note-taking-software/ https://www.americanbar.org/groups/gpsolo/resources/ereport/...
- pjc50 6mo ago
  People opt in to the panopticon and then discover they have no more secrets. I'm surprised lawyers fall for that as well.
  - lukewarm707 6mo ago
    the doofus lawyer probably didn't realise, i wouldn't call it opt in
  - close04 6mo ago
    If a lawyer takes notes and puts them in a computer, or a cloud drive, or send it over email, they are still covered by attorney-client privilege, right? If they use an AI to do it, it's treated more like a third party no longer covered by the same privilege. If there's no court decision on this it only takes a bit of bad assumption to screw up with using AI. To be fair, the attorney-client privilege should be completely technology/medium agnostic. If the intention is to have that info stay between client and attorney, nothing should change this.
- lukewarm707 6mo ago
  [dead]
- vintagedave 6mo ago
  > It's in the viewable text on the page. Not for me - there was no viewable text.
WillAdams 6mo ago
Reminds me of when I worked for a small shop which had the copier maintenance contract at a local college --- when something went wrong and wasn't properly addressed, my bosses found themselves being held to account with their own words from prior phone calls being quoted back to them verbatim --- which they were mystified by until I explained that the administrators had all come up from the clerical pool and knew shorthand.
LanceH 6mo ago
They are saying that it could invalidate attorney client privilege because the transcription could technically be available to an outside party. I suspect what isn't being said by the lawyers is they want to keep attorney client privilege so they can outright lie.
- keernan 6mo ago
  >they want to keep attorney client privilege so they can outright lie As a trial attorney for over 40 years, that is an incredibly offensive take. Attorney/client privilege is usually litigation related and a prime example of the nature of conversations involve our advising our client of the prospects of prevailing at trial and whether to engage in settlement discussions with money amounts involved. If some day you are sued and you have a conversation with your lawyer about your financial worth as well as how much you are willing to pay to the person suing you - and that information ends up being turned over to the person suing you - you won't be so snide about the importance of attorney client privilege.
bearjaws 6mo ago
The main risk is attorney client privilege and it's already been tested in New York, if you transcribe a call you need to turn over the transcriptions and they can subpoena the company doing the transcription for the records if you refuse.

Tistron 6mo ago

https://archive.is/wPKhf https://archive.is/wPKhf

skinfaxi 6mo ago

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/09/business/dealbook/ai-notetakers-legal-risk.html?unlocked_article_code=1.hlA.JNyk.LBxrop4y_CR-&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/09/business/dealbook/ai-note...

burningion 6mo ago

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.

coffeebeqn 6mo ago
Plus they are super inaccurate. Gemini gets one of its three bullet subtly or very majorly wrong almost every time. Just a few weeks ago Gemini said we’re rolling out our payment setup in Russia. You know the place where we have 20+ sanctions packages on? We were talking about France in the meeting.
- pjc50 6mo ago
  Given how financial services can impose silent inexplicable lifetime bans for using the wrong words in the "what is this transaction for" field, I'm wondering at what point the AI automatically reports people for sanctions violation based on its mishearing.
- operation_moose 6mo ago
  We've found they're surprisingly good if everyone on the call is using a decent headset. The problems start when using conference room audio or someone is on their laptop mic. If they miss a word they never do unintelligible, they just start playing madlibs based on the rest of the sentence. We just went through a round of 100+ (non-sensitive) VoC interviews and they really cut down the workload of compiling all of the feedback. If the audio was a little shaky though, we pretty much had to throw away the transcripts and do them from scratch like we used to.
  - user_7832 6mo ago
    > If they miss a word they never do unintelligible, they just start playing madlibs based on the rest of the sentence. Imo this is the single biggest flaw of LLMs. They're great at a lot of things, but knowing when they're wrong (or don't have enough information to actually work on) is a critical flaw. IMO there's nothing structural about why they shouldn't be able to spot this and correct themselves - I suspect it's a training issue. But presumably bots that infer context/fill in the dots rank better on what people like... at the cost of accuracy.

pfortuny 6mo ago

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.

dsr_ 6mo ago
Most services have privacy policies that boil down to: - we promise not to share PII (defined as narrowly as possible) - we promise not to share payment information except with our payment system - if you pay us, we promise not to train LLMs on your data - you agree that everything else can be used for any business purpose, including marketing, intelligence gathering, and "sharing with our 1735 trusted partners".
- pfortuny 6mo ago
  OK. But those can be "Zukerberg" promises?
cj 6mo ago
> I am totally baffled by the trust people put on these systems The average person doesn't care about online privacy.
- sdellis 6mo ago
  They care, but realize that there is no such thing as privacy anymore. The amount of obsession required to maybe maintain some degree of privacy is not something most people are willing to do.
  - cj 6mo ago
    When the average person thinks about "online privacy" they think about keeping things private from other people. They don't think about keeping their data private from the companies hosting/processing their data.

sandworm101 6mo ago

>> 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.

hugh-avherald 6mo ago
It sounds like the prison recordings were compulsory, which is a different kettle-of-fish. The key phrase "if they share" implies voluntary and deliberate action, and is not much of an oversimplification imo. > What matters is that the parties intended and expected communications to be privileged. I would contend that your summary, not theirs, is a oversimplification. Jurisdictions will obviously differ, but privilege does not attach merely because of the intent and beliefs of the lawyer and client.
- sandworm101 6mo ago
  Well, I try to avoid the R word. The actual legal term would be reasonable intention. Literal expressed intention. ie putting an A-C warning on every email, won't be enough on its own. IMHO we should just assume the R word before every verb in every legal discussion. That is how reality works. These are not spells. If I express that I intend something to be private, then announce it using a megaphone at a basketball game, my intention is no longer reasonable regardless of what magic words I have thrown into my communication. Act like an idiot and a court will treat you like an idiot.

rpaddock 6mo ago

Some companies want no records at all, see: "2028 – A Dystopian Story By Jack Ganssle": http://www.ganssle.com/articles/2028adystopianstory.htm 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 https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_26

next_xibalba 6mo ago
See also the OpenAI vs. Musk trial, where Greg Brockman's diary and Sam Altman's texts have taken center stage.
djoldman 6mo ago
This was interesting and sent me down a research hole. General conclusion: Corporate litigation is mostly just a series of self-investigations so that both sides can learn what both sides actually know, given that neither side knows much about themselves OR the other side. At the same time both sides are trying to stop the other side from getting the judge to order them to do more investigating.
kjs3 6mo ago
Much of my experience with corporate counsel is one of 2 extremes: "keep everything"[1] or "keep nothing". Keep everything, because then you can't be caught out deleting something possibly relevant, which looks very, very bad in court. Keep nothing, because then opposing counsel can't catch you out only keeping things that make you look good in court. [1] There's actually a subset of this, which includes "...until you are legally allowed to delete it, then delete everything". This is driven by regulation (e.g. SOX in the US).

analogpixel 6mo ago

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

bilekas 6mo ago
It's no impressive, it's scummy hiding news behind a paywal, they simple use some CSS trickery to set the height of the content to the size of your view, so there is nowhere to scroll to.

natebc 6mo ago

gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/09/business/dealbook/ai-notetakers-legal-risk.html?unlocked_article_code=1.hlA.EhDF.CayH8Rwfk_Dm&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/09/business/dealbook/ai-note...

senko 6mo ago

[dead]

gwbas1c 6mo ago

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. --- 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.)

skinfaxi 6mo ago
> 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. This is horrifying. Why do you feel the necessity to self-censor? What consequences do you anticipate?
- jkingsman 6mo ago
  Adding on to this question, do you anticipate the same people capable of tapping phones to think less of you for a dirty joke? The people whose opinion of me would lower for something off-color and the people who possess the ability to wiretap me are a disjoint set lol.
  - dnnddidiej 6mo ago
    The point is it would be usable against you, but at the point you are wiretapped and can be used in court all bets are off you are probably in too much trouble may as well tell the joke!
    - jkingsman 6mo ago

chris_explicare 6mo ago

[flagged]

testfoobar 6mo ago

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

atonse 6mo ago

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.

JohnBizBiz 6mo ago
[flagged]

ryanshrott 6mo ago

[dead]

samuelknight 6mo ago

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?

redmaple892 6mo ago

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

bottlepalm 6mo ago

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.

AstroBen 6mo ago
It's not just work meetings. This is being taken to healthcare settings, also.
- bottlepalm 6mo ago
  That's fine with me actually. I recently had an appointment where the doctor asked if he could use AI notes, I said yes, and meeting was so much nicer than before when the doctor is typing half the time. We can have a real conversation, nothing I say is missed, and later on the doctor can use AI to cross reference results or whatever else with our past discussions. That's win-win all around.
  - rationalist 6mo ago
    The cases I've heard of where AI doctor notes went badly, is in recording numbers that another doctor relies upon. If it's just a casual conversation, it's probably okay. If it's about cancer treatments, maybe ask for manual notes. I've had doctors write horribly-incorrect notes in my digital chart after appointments, so please don't think I'm trying to be a Luddite.

RobotToaster 6mo ago

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...

1vuio0pswjnm7 6mo ago

Alternative to archive.is No Javascript, no CAPTCHA, no geoblocking, no DDoS directed at blog https://static.nytimes.com/narrated-articles/synthetic/article-426bd9b8-90cd-5839-bd2d-b44c456e82db/job-1778357709215/article-426bd9b8-90cd-5839-bd2d-b44c456e82db-job-1778357709215.mp3 https://static.nytimes.com/narrated-articles/synthetic/artic...

swyx 6mo ago
you forgot to mention it requires 13 minutes of audio listening
- anigbrowl 6mo ago
  There's an AI to do that for you
1vuio0pswjnm7 6mo ago
Alternative to archive.is Works where archive.is is blocked Text-only, no DDoS directed at blog view-source:https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/09/business/dealbook/ai-notetakers-legal-risk.html Save as 1.htm Something like egrep -o "(\"text\":\"[^\"]+)|(\"textAlign\":\"LEFT\")|(\"url\":\"[^\"]+)|(\"__typename\":\"TextInline\")" 1.htm \ |sed '/\"url\":\"/{s/??.*//;s/$/\">/;s/.\{7\}/<a href=\"/;}; /\"__typename\":\"TextInline\"/{s/\"$/<\/a>/;s/.\{24\}//;}; s/\"textAlign\":\"LEFT\"/<p>/g;/\"text\":\"/s/.\{8\}//' \ |sed '1s/^/<meta charset=utf-8><meta name=viewport content=width=device-width>/' > 2.htm rm 1.htm firefox ./2.htm NB. Javascript and CSS interpreters are needed only for Datadome challenge. The following DNS data, e.g., A RRs, are required ct.captcha-delivery.com geo.captcha-delivery.com www.nytimes.com g1.nyt.com No other DNS data is required
- JacobKfromIRC 6mo ago
  Cool! Would you be willing to license this code as GPL-3.0-or-later, or some other free license? I'd like to include a JavaScript derivative of this for Haketilo (a userscript manager). I would add it to a collection of scripts that aim to replace proprietary JavaScript here: https://codeberg.org/JacobK/unfinished-site-fixes/ https://codeberg.org/JacobK/unfinished-site-fixes/

roysting 6mo ago

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.

properbrew 6mo ago

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 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.

cjohnson318 6mo ago
100% I picked up shorthand to take notes quicker, but I'm still half-in/half-out of the conversation, mentally deciding what's important enough to jot down. This sounds like a great solution.

tbagman 6mo ago

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...

SVI 6mo ago
It certainly has a chilling effect. Meetings where there are robust discussions may become a thing of the past.

runfreeapps 6mo ago

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.

doctorpangloss 6mo ago
you are talking management level intelligence to a very Individual Contributor crowd. People will nuke every opportunity presented to them in their life in defense of NDAs that don't matter - better called Not Doing Anythings.

trunkiedozer 6mo ago

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

simonreiff 6mo ago

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.

ryanmcdonough 6mo ago

I built https://getminute.me 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.

fwbruno 6mo ago

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.

ridgeguy 6mo ago

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).

arboles 6mo ago

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-are-the-limits-of-attorney-client-privilege.html#:~:text=Privileged%20attorney%2Dclient%20communications%20include https://www.findlaw.com/criminal/criminal-legal-help/what-ar...

prima-facie 6mo ago

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.

gib444 6mo ago
IANAL How can AI learn the secret procedural tricks? Where's the training data? And is there a legal consequence for AI giving bad/incorrect legal advice? Can they get disbarred? Can you be sure the AI tool even read an entire piece of legislation (inb4 "you can't with lawyers either" : I thought we're aiming for better)? How will they understand the inner workings of courts, CPS etc? How will they network with other lawyers for advice and learning (how will the LLM train on that)?
- prima-facie 6mo ago
  > And is there a legal consequence for AI giving bad/incorrect legal advice? Can they get disbarred? Of course not :) but unfortunately I've received half-truths and outright lies from actual solicitors, while AI has mostly given reliable advice, even if not procedurally perfect. There's lots of guarding and unwritten rules in the legal profession so this is not something that will be straightforward to train on, but once done, even if imperfect, will bring legal access to the masses.

josefritzishere 6mo ago

Many employers prohobit them by policy.

lacymorrow 6mo ago

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noashavit 6mo ago

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

theuniverseson 6mo ago

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