Chicago Business Attorney Blog
Only if every single person on the call actually consents, and that requirement is a lot stricter than most businesses using these tools realize. Illinois is one of the toughest states in the country on recording consent, and AI note takers, Otter, Fireflies, Zoom’s AI companion, Microsoft Teams transcription, and similar tools, don’t get a pass just because a person didn’t personally hit a record button. The law treats the AI tool exactly the same as a tape recorder, and in some cases, it creates a second layer of legal risk most businesses have never even considered.
Illinois Law Doesn’t Care How Sophisticated the Tool Is
Illinois is an all-party consent state meaning every participant in a private conversation has to consent before it’s recorded, whether that conversation happens in person, over the phone, or through a video call. The statute defines an eavesdropping device broadly enough to cover any technology capable of recording a conversation, and it explicitly applies to AI transcription tools the same way it applies to a phone recorder. There’s no carveout for automation, no exception because the recording exists to generate a summary instead of an audio file, and no exception because only one person on the call actually chose to turn the tool on.