When an AI note-taker joins your meeting, an old Massachusetts law comes with it.
By: Michael Lewis, Esq.
Four people join a Teams meeting: an owner, a supervisor, an employee, and the HR director. Then a fifth participant appears. It is not a person. It is an AI note-taker.
Twenty minutes later, the software has produced a searchable transcript, including a sentence the manager wishes she had phrased differently. No one meant to create evidence. They wanted notes. The convenience is obvious. The legal question is not.
Massachusetts’ Wiretap Act dates to 1968. Its preamble reads like a time capsule: organized crime, electronic surveillance, secret eavesdropping. Yet its language reaches an ordinary workplace meeting. The statute targets willful, secret recording or listening through a device without prior authority from all parties. Violations can carry criminal penalties and civil liability.
This summer, the Supreme Judicial Court revisited that law at a Springfield sobriety checkpoint. In Commonwealth v. Grimaldi, a driver said he did not know State Police troopers were recording him. But the recording was hardly concealed: a large reflective sign warned of audio and video recording, and the body cameras sat visibly on the troopers’ chests with red lights illuminated.
The SJC found no willful interception. Willfulness, the court explained, requires more than an intent to record; it requires an intent to record secretly. The court left another question unanswered: whether the recording itself qualified as “secret.”
For employers, that distinction matters. Grimaldi does not mean a recording icon, a bot in the participant list, or fine print on a screen automatically solves the problem. The court never decided that. It does show that the circumstances matter: Was the recording hidden? What notice was given? What was done to make it apparent?
Now reverse the scene. In Simpson v. Boston Public Health Commission, a subordinate allegedly recorded a heated argument with her manager without consent and sent it to supervisors. The employer’s investigator deliberately did not listen, relying instead on interviews and other evidence. When litigation followed, a Superior Court judge held that the Wiretap Act did not require the recording to be excluded from the civil case. The statute provides an exclusion remedy in criminal proceedings, the judge explained, but not a comparable one in civil cases.
That creates an uncomfortable possibility: someone may violate Massachusetts law by secretly making a recording, yet the recording may still become evidence later.
Think about the conversations businesses hold every week: a harassment complaint, a final warning, an argument between owners, a disputed change order, a sales negotiation. A phone can capture one secretly. An AI assistant can capture another in plain sight. Either can preserve words long after everyone remembers the conversation differently.
So what should a business do? Start with the technology. Know which platforms can record or transcribe, who can activate them, whether outside bots can join automatically, where the files go, and how long they remain there. For sensitive HR, legal, medical, financial, or trade-secret discussions, automatic recording or transcription should not become the default.
When recording serves a legitimate purpose, make it deliberate. Tell everyone before it begins and obtain their agreement rather than betting that an icon or automated notice has done enough. Decide who can access the recording and how long the company will keep it.
Nor is a blanket ban necessarily the answer. Federal labor law protects some concerted activity concerning working conditions, even in nonunion workplaces, so an overbroad recording rule can create a separate issue. If a secret recording lands in management’s inbox, resist the urge to forward it or immediately rely on it. Preserve it, limit its circulation, and determine what the law permits before using it.
Recording a meeting once required a conscious decision. Increasingly, it arrives as a software setting. Every business should decide who may record, how participants will give permission, where recordings and transcripts will go, how long they will remain there, and what happens when an employee records a workplace conversation.
Those answers should come before the fifth person joins the meeting, not after it has created the transcript.
Michael Lewis is an attorney in the Springfield office of Halloran Sage. His practice focuses on commercial litigation and employment matters for businesses and employers in Massachusetts and Connecticut.