The shift from human note-takers to AI bots that quietly join your Zoom calls happened in about 18 months. Otter.ai's notetaker, Fireflies, Granola, Read.ai, Fathom — they all promise the same thing: dump everything said in a meeting into a searchable transcript, then run an LLM over it to extract action items. The pitch is irresistible for productivity-obsessed teams. The legal exposure is something most of those teams haven't started thinking about.

That's beginning to change. A round of consent-related class action filings in 2024 and 2025, combined with state attorneys general looking at session recording laws, has put AI note-takers into the same uncomfortable position that web session replay tools were in five years ago.…