Attorneys and meeting hosts are putting AI notetaker apps and automated speech recognition into depositions, hearings, and client calls — often without every party knowing. A new August 2026 briefing from the Jeopardizing Justice Coalition walks through why that is a problem for the official record, attorney-client privilege, and due process.
We are sharing the full briefing here. Quinn’s Reporting did not write it. It was prepared by the Jeopardizing Justice Coalition, a group of court reporting professionals. Like those authors, we have a professional interest in how the legal record is created. The document itself discloses that interest.
Document: Justice Impact Briefing: Risks Associated with the Use of AI Transcription Tools and Notetaking Apps in Legal Proceedings
Author: Jeopardizing Justice Coalition
Date: August 2026
Source: jeopardizingjustice.com
What the briefing covers
The paper focuses on five issues:
- Security — Cloud notetakers (Otter, Fireflies, Copilot, and similar tools) send audio to third-party vendors. Legal proceedings routinely include privileged communications, trade secrets, and personal data. Those recordings can be discoverable, retained, or breached.
- Privacy and consent — Many apps join a Zoom or Teams call with little notice. All-party consent / wiretap rules still apply. ABA Formal Opinion 512 and New York City Bar Formal Opinion 2025-6 put the duty on the lawyer, not the vendor.
- Privilege waiver — Sharing a privileged conversation with a public AI tool can destroy attorney-client privilege. The briefing cites United States v. Heppner (S.D.N.Y. 2026), where chats with a generative AI platform were held not privileged.
- Accuracy, bias, and hallucination — ASR still struggles with overlapping speech, legal terms, accents, and pauses. Research cited in the briefing includes Whisper hallucinations (including fabricated harmful phrases) and roughly double word-error rates for Black speakers versus white speakers in major commercial ASR systems.
- Provenance and accountability — A certified transcript has a named custodian. An AI transcript often has no model version, no hash of the original audio, and no person who can be cross-examined about what the machine produced.
The coalition’s position is not “ban AI.” It is that technology used to create or certify the official record should meet published standards for accuracy, speaker attribution, hallucination rate, audit trail, and human accountability.
Why this matters in a deposition
FRCP 30(b)(3) requires the noticing party to state the recording method. A hidden notetaker bot is a second recording outside the officer’s control. If one appears on a remote deposition, the briefing’s practical advice is simple: treat it like an uninvited guest. Ask the host to remove it. The record should be made by or under the direction of the officer.
Read the full briefing
How to cite
Jeopardizing Justice Coalition. (2026, August). Justice Impact Briefing: Risks associated with the use of AI transcription tools and notetaking apps in legal proceedings. https://jeopardizingjustice.com/
The briefing is not legal advice. For questions about a specific proceeding, talk with counsel and follow the court rules in that jurisdiction.