# Is it legal to record a meeting?

Last reviewed: 2026-07-11 · Not legal advice

Usually yes, if you're in it — but the exceptions are exactly the states where a lot of business happens.

## Quick answer

- **Federal law and most states: one-party consent.** As a participant you are the one party — you can record without asking (18 U.S.C. § 2511(2)(d), absent criminal or tortious purpose).
- **Eleven-plus states: all-party consent** for confidential communications — including California, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Washington. On cross-state calls, follow the strictest rule in the room. State-by-state reference: RCFP Reporter's Recording Guide.

## What AI notetakers change — and don't

The law doesn't care whether a human or software presses record. What changes is disclosure mechanics: a bot notetaker announces itself in the participant list (a form of notice, though silence ≠ consent in all-party states). Device-side tools — Granola, Krisp's botless mode, and our own Minutes — record with no visible artifact in the meeting. Better product design, worse automatic disclosure: the duty to inform lands entirely on you.

We build a botless tool, so plainly: botless capture is not a mechanism for recording people without their knowledge, and using it that way in an all-party state is illegal. Minutes' recording frontmatter carries a consent field — so the record itself can document how consent was obtained.

## The habit that solves it everywhere

Open every recorded meeting with: **"I'd like to record this for notes — everyone okay with that?"** Affirmative answers satisfy the strictest state, the acknowledgment lives on the recording, and it's good manners. Layered on top: workplace policy, sector rules, and non-US law (the EU treats recordings as personal-data processing under GDPR — a legal-basis analysis, not one-party/all-party).

## Consent to record ≠ consent to upload

"Okay if I record?" quietly became "okay if this goes to a transcription vendor, an LLM provider, and a US cloud?" when cloud notetakers took over. With on-device tools the questions collapse back into one — the recording exists only on the machine of the person who asked. "It stays on my laptop" is a sentence everyone in the room can evaluate.

## Sources

- https://www.rcfp.org/reporters-recording-guide/
- https://www.justia.com/50-state-surveys/recording-phone-calls-and-conversations/
- https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2511
- https://useminutes.app/resources/ai-notetakers-attorney-client-privilege
- https://useminutes.app/resources/remove-ai-notetaker-bots-from-meetings
- https://useminutes.app/writing/governance-built-in-not-retrofitted