The noteakers are ready to start the meeting, but will they always be so welcome? A class action lawsuit targeting one of the most widely used AI transcription tools is drawing new attention to a compliance gap for HR teams to worry about: the legal risks of AI-powered meeting notetakers in the workplace.
In re Otter.AI Privacy Litigation, now a consolidated case before Judge Eumi K. Lee in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges that Otter.ai’s notetaking tools recorded private conversations without the consent of all participants and used those recordings to train its AI models without adequate disclosure. No substantive rulings have been issued yet, but employment attorneys say the case is already signaling where liability could land for employers.
“The AI transcription and recording issue is a hot issue,” says Bradford Kelley, a shareholder at Littler Mendelson who co-authored a February 2026 analysis of the litigation. He told HR Executive that human resource teams should be “very interested in this case.”
Kelley says that his firm gets quite a few questions from employers operating in states that have all-party consent: “What do we need to do to make sure we’re in line with best practices?”
According to Littler, federal wiretap law and most state counterparts follow a one‑party consent rule. Still, approximately a dozen states require all participants to consent to the interception or recording...
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