Resource
Usually yes, if you’re in it — but the exceptions are exactly the states where a lot of business happens, and AI notetakers have made the question urgent for people who never thought about wiretap law before. Here’s the map, what changes when software does the recording, and the one habit that keeps you clear everywhere.
Quick answer
Federal law and most states: one-party consent. If you’re 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, Nevada (as interpreted), New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Washington. On a call spanning states, follow the strictest rule in the room. The RCFP guide linked below is the current state-by-state reference.
The law doesn’t care whether a human or software presses record. What changes is the disclosure mechanics. A bot notetaker announces itself — it sits in the participant list as “Otter Notetaker” or “Fireflies.ai Notetaker,” which is a form of notice (though silence is not consent in all-party states). Device-side tools — Granola, Krisp’s botless mode, and our own Minutes — record without any visible artifact in the meeting. That’s better product design and worse automatic disclosure: the duty to inform lands entirely on you.
We build a botless tool, so let’s be unambiguous about our own product: botless capture is not a mechanism for recording people without their knowledge, and using it that way in an all-party state is illegal. It’s why Minutes’ recording frontmatter carries a consent field — so the record itself can document how consent was obtained.
Open every recorded meeting with one sentence and a pause: “I’d like to record this for notes — everyone okay with that?” Affirmative answers satisfy the strictest all-party state, the acknowledgment lives on the recording itself, and — the underrated part — it’s just good manners. Most consent-law trouble in business contexts starts as a courtesy failure before it becomes a legal one.
Layered on top: workplace policy (employers often standardize notice via meeting platforms), sector rules (health, finance, education), and non-US law — the EU treats recordings as personal-data processing under GDPR, which is a consent-or- legal-basis analysis, not a one-party/all-party one. When in doubt, announce and ask; when the stakes are real, ask counsel.
Consent to record and consent to uploadare different things, and participants increasingly know it. “Okay if I record?” quietly became “okay if this conversation goes to a transcription vendor, an LLM provider, and a US cloud?” when cloud notetakers took over. With on-device tools the two questions collapse back into one — the recording exists only on the machine of the person who asked. Several people have told us that’s made the consent conversation itself easier: “it stays on my laptop” is a sentence everyone in the room can evaluate.
Next step
Informational, not legal advice. Consent law is state- and fact-specific and changes; the RCFP guide is the reference to check, and counsel is the answer when it matters.