NYC Bar Association Releases Formal Opinion on Ethical Use of AI for Recording, Transcribing, and Summarizing Non-Client Conversations

The New York City Bar Association issued Formal Opinion 2026-2, which addresses how the New York Rules of Professional Conduct impact audio and video calls between attorneys and persons who are not clients where either the attorney or the client may want to make use of an artificial intelligence (AI) tool to record, transcribe and create a summary of the conversation.  

“As is true with clients, an attorney should obtain consent of all other parties to a call before recording it, and should consider whether recording, transcribing and summarizing is tactically well-advised in the particular circumstances,” the opinion says. It also states that “as the default practice (that is, absent a good reason to record a conversation in a particular instance) an attorney should avoid recording conversations because recording entails ethical and tactical risks.” 

This ethics opinion builds on existing principles for the use of generative AI in legal practice, and “provides a non-exhaustive list of some of the ethical issues—and potential risks—that arise when attorneys use AI to record, transcribe, and summarize conversations with people other than their clients, and the default practice should be not to use AI tools to record, transcribe or summarize conversations absent a good reason in a particular instance,” according to the opinion. 

Read the full opinion here.

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About the New York City Bar Association
The mission of the New York City Bar Association, which was founded in 1870 and has over 20,000 members, is to equip and mobilize a diverse legal profession to practice with excellence, promote reform of the law, and uphold the rule of law and access to justice in support of a fair society and the public interest in our community, our nation, and throughout the world. www.nycbar.org