Security
Can Lawyers Use AI Note Takers?
Dylan de Heer
Yes, but not by default, and not silently. In December 2025 the New York City Bar Association's Committee on Professional Ethics published Formal Opinion 2025-6, which deals specifically with using AI to record, transcribe and summarise conversations with clients. It does not ban the practice. It sets conditions.
This piece covers what the opinion actually says, the three technical facts that decide whether a given tool is defensible, and the parts of the problem that no software choice will solve for you.
What the NYC Bar opinion actually says
Formal Opinion 2025-6 was issued on 22 December 2025. Its own summary is direct: attorneys are free to choose not to use AI to record such conversations, but electing to do so creates important ethical obligations.
Four duties come out of it.
Get consent before recording. Not implied consent, not a line buried in an engagement letter nobody read. Quietly switching on a notetaker during a client call is inconsistent with the candour lawyers owe clients, and in some states it is also a criminal matter rather than an ethical one.
Decide whether recording is tactically wise at all. This is the part most tool comparisons skip. The opinion asks you to consider whether a verbatim, searchable, permanent record of a privileged conversation is something you want to exist. Sometimes the answer is no, and the right tool is a pen.
Check the output. If a transcript or summary might be preserved and relied on later, a lawyer should verify it. AI transcription makes errors, and an error in a client meeting summary can misstate what a client told you.
Advise clients about their own tools. If you know a client is running their own notetaker on your call, the opinion says you should tell them about the disadvantages.
The Illinois Supreme Court Commission on Professionalism reached the same place from Illinois rules: technology competence, confidentiality under Rule 1.6, and supervision under Rule 5.3 all apply to an AI tool the same way they apply to a paralegal.
The three facts that decide whether a tool is defensible
There is a real case for these tools before we get to the risks, and the Illinois commission makes it rather than dismissing it. A verbatim transcript can help a client who is deaf or hard of hearing follow their own matter, and it gives a client working in a second language something to re-read and translate afterwards. Accessibility is a genuine argument, not a marketing one, and it deserves weighing against the confidentiality cost rather than being waved past.
Strip away the marketing and the confidentiality analysis comes down to three questions about what happens to the audio.
Where does it go, and how long does it stay? A cloud notetaker transmits the recording to a server and keeps it. You need to know the retention period, whether you can compel deletion, and what happens to the data if the vendor is acquired or breached.
Is it used to train models? Some terms of service permit the vendor to use customer content to improve their systems. If that applies to a recorded client meeting, the content has travelled considerably further than the two people on the call intended.
Who at the vendor can read it? This is the one that produces the privilege argument. Attorney-client privilege protects communications made for the purpose of obtaining legal advice. Introduce a third party who can access the contents and opposing counsel has something to argue about. The Illinois commission puts it plainly: if vendor staff can access data content, a court could later find that the presence of that third party waives privilege.
Notice that all three are questions about architecture, not about features. No amount of encryption-at-rest language answers them, because they are about who holds the keys and what the contract permits.
Are AI note takers legal?
Ethics and law are separate problems, and the legal one is more jurisdictional than most tool pages admit.
Recording consent law varies. Some states require only one party to consent, others require every participant. Illinois, for example, generally makes it unlawful to record a private conversation without informed consent from everyone in it. Get this wrong and the exposure is not a bar complaint, it is a statute.
Biometric law is the less obvious trap. Illinois's Biometric Information Privacy Act treats a voiceprint as a biometric identifier. A tool that performs speaker identification is arguably generating exactly that, which brings notice, consent, retention and destruction requirements with it.
We have written separately on whether it is legal to record a meeting, but the honest summary for a lawyer is that this is a question for your jurisdiction and your matter, not one a software vendor should answer for you.
Where local processing changes the analysis, and where it does not
This is where we have an interest, so here is the claim stated narrowly enough to check.
Of the three risk questions above, a notetaker that runs entirely on your own machine removes one of them. If the audio never leaves the Mac, there is no vendor server holding it, no retention schedule to negotiate, no terms of service permitting training on the contents, and no vendor employee who could be characterised as a third party to the conversation. The privilege waiver argument that comes from routing the call through an outside processor does not arise, because the call was not routed anywhere.
Weeve works this way. Recording, transcription and summarising all run on the Mac itself, using local models. No bot joins the call, because it captures the Mac's own audio rather than joining as a participant, so there is no assistant sitting visibly in a client meeting. Nothing of the meeting uploads.
That is one risk closed. It is worth being equally clear about what it does not close.
It does not remove the consent duty. Local processing is an answer to "where does the recording live", not to "did you tell the client". The NYC Bar opinion asks for consent regardless of architecture, and so does your state's recording statute.
It does not remove the review duty. A local model makes transcription errors like any other. Speech recognition of every kind degrades with heavy accents, people talking over each other and background noise, which describes a fair number of client meetings. The opinion's instruction to verify the output applies exactly as written.
It does not make a tool right for depositions. A deposition transcript is the work of a certified court reporter, and that is a professional and evidentiary requirement, not a software gap. Any AI notetaker, local or not, is the wrong instrument for that job.
It is not a compliance certificate. Weeve is not SOC 2 or HIPAA certified. The argument for it is architectural rather than a certification: the data does not leave the device, so there is less about which to make representations.
It is Mac only. Weeve needs Apple Silicon and macOS 14.4 or later. If your firm runs Windows, this particular answer is not available to you yet.
If the comparison is useful, we keep a roundup of AI note takers for lawyers and a wider one on private AI meeting assistants.
A checklist before you switch anything on
Ask the client, out loud, before the recording starts. Put the position in your engagement letter so it is not a conversation you have to improvise.
Read the vendor's terms on retention, deletion and model training. If you cannot find them in ten minutes, treat that as the answer.
Establish whether vendor staff can access content. This is the privilege question.
Check your jurisdiction's recording consent rule and any biometric statute that speaker identification might trigger.
Check meeting platform defaults. Zoom, Teams and Google Meet all ship notetaking features that can be enabled at the account level without the person in the meeting choosing it.
Read the summary before you rely on it. Every time.
Decide whether this particular conversation should be recorded at all.
Step seven is the one worth sitting with. The opinion asks more than which tool you picked. It asks whether a permanent, searchable record of a privileged conversation serves the client, and there are matters where the answer is no.
FAQ
Are AI note takers legal?
Generally yes, subject to recording consent law where you practise. Some jurisdictions require every participant to consent, and a few also regulate voiceprints as biometric data, which speaker identification may generate. Legality and professional ethics are separate tests and you need to pass both.
Is it ethical for attorneys to use AI note takers?
Under NYC Bar Formal Opinion 2025-6, yes, provided you obtain client consent, consider whether recording is tactically appropriate, and verify any transcript or summary that might later be relied upon. The opinion treats the tool as permitted rather than encouraged, and the obligations sit with the lawyer, not the vendor.
Does an AI note taker waive attorney-client privilege?
It can create the argument. Privilege protects communications made to obtain legal advice, and introducing a third party who can access the contents gives opposing counsel a waiver theory to run. The Illinois Supreme Court Commission on Professionalism raises exactly this point about vendor staff access. A tool that processes on your own device does not introduce that third party.
Can I use an AI note taker for a deposition?
No. Deposition transcripts are produced by certified court reporters, and that is an evidentiary and professional requirement rather than something software replaces. AI notetakers are for your own meetings: client calls, intake, internal case discussions.
What if my client is running their own AI note taker?
The opinion says you should advise them of the disadvantages, which include the recording reaching a third-party server, the possibility of privilege loss, and the risk that an inaccurate summary shapes their understanding of your advice. Setting the expectation in the engagement letter is easier than raising it mid-call.
Do local AI note takers solve the confidentiality problem?
They solve one part of it. Keeping audio on the device removes the outside processor, the retention schedule and the training question. It does not remove your duty to obtain consent, your duty to check the output, or your jurisdiction's recording law.
Privilege is not a setting you enable. It is a consequence of who was in the room.
If your work is the kind where that matters, Weeve records, transcribes and summarises meetings entirely on a Mac, on a free plan that covers ten recordings a month. It needs Apple Silicon and macOS 14.4 or later, it is not a substitute for a court reporter, and it will not ask your client for consent on your behalf.
