AI notetakers for civil litigation law firms

This is general information, not legal advice. Check your jurisdiction's recording and ethics rules. We make Astrid and say below where its note templates are general.

What a litigation firm actually needs documented

Litigation produces paper, but the decisions behind the paper happen on calls: whether to accept an offer, what a witness will say, what opposing counsel agreed to, which deadline moved. Those conversations are easy to lose. A note that says who agreed to what, and who authorized it, is the difference between a clean file and an argument about what was said.

The conversations worth documenting, with the call types Astrid offers a civil litigation firm:

• Client strategy and case updates. Pleadings, hearings, discovery, deadlines, rulings, and the client's instructions. Astrid's case update call type covers this.
• Settlement discussions. An offer, a demand, valuation, and whether to accept. The most important thing to record is the authority the client gave.
• Meet and confer. A call between counsel to resolve a discovery or procedural dispute. For this call type Astrid drafts a confirming letter to opposing counsel instead of a client recap.
• Witness interviews. The attorney interviews a witness, not the client, about what they saw or know.
• Discovery planning. Written discovery, document production, depositions and experts.
• Intake and status calls, as in any practice.

The firm can add its own call types, such as a client deposition preparation call.

What it should not replace

A notetaker's transcript and summary are a working record. They are not the record of a proceeding.

• Depositions. Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 30(b)(3)(A) requires a deposition notice to state how the testimony will be recorded: audio, audiovisual or stenographic. The certified transcript from the court reporter is the record you cite.
• Hearings and trials. Courts have their own recording rules. In federal courts the official record is made by a court reporter or an electronic recording, and judicial policy generally bars broadcasting or recording of courtroom proceedings by others. State rules vary, and we did not survey them.
• Anything that needs to be certified. Use a reporter. Use the notetaker for the preparation call before the deposition and the debrief after it.

A notetaker is for your own side's conversations and the calls around the proceeding.

Calls with people who are not your client

Most of the ethics guidance about AI notetakers is about client calls. The NYC Bar's Formal Opinion 2025-6 addresses recording client conversations; it does not settle recording opposing counsel or a witness. We found no bar opinion on that point.

The recording law applies to them as it does to anyone. Federal law requires one party's consent. Several states require every party's consent, including California, Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, with nuances in others, and when parties are in different states courts differ on which law applies. Justia's 50-state survey is a good starting point. A practical rule for a call with someone on the other side is to tell them at the start that the call is recorded and get their agreement on the record, and to take your own notes either way.

Privilege and work product

A call with your client is privileged, and your notes about a witness interview may be work product. Two things to check.

• Who can see it inside your firm. In Astrid an attorney can mark a call privileged, which restricts its content to attorney seats and firm administrators. The marking is off by default, so unmarked calls are visible to every seat. Decide your firm's rule and apply it when the call is captured.
• Who else can use it outside your firm. Two federal decisions in February 2026, United States v. Heppner and Warner v. Gilbarco, reached different results on whether a litigant's own use of a public AI chatbot was protected. Neither involved a law firm's notetaker, so do not read them as notetaker rulings. The more relevant lesson comes from the August 2026 order in In re Otter.AI Privacy Litigation: at the pleading stage the court found it plausible that a vendor that kept and reused recordings for its own purposes was a third party to the conversation. Choose a vendor that is prohibited from training on or independently using your recordings, and get that in writing.

Billing

Hourly billing is the most common model in litigation (Clio reports 71 percent of firms offer it), though flat-fee work is up 34 percent since 2016, and some matters are contingent. Whatever your model, ABA Formal Opinion 512 says hourly fees must reflect actual time spent, so time an AI tool saves is not time to bill as if you had spent it. A notetaker documents the work. It should not decide what you bill.

What to check before you buy

• Does it capture calls, not just video meetings? Settlement talks and meet and confers are often phone calls.
• How does it handle a call with opposing counsel or a witness? It should give you a way to disclose and to record that disclosure.
• Can privileged and work product notes be restricted to the attorneys on the matter?
• Does the vendor train on or reuse recordings? It should be prohibited in writing.
• Is it clear the product is not a substitute for a court reporter?
• Does it file to your matter system and your task list, after an attorney approves the note?
• Is there an approval trail showing who approved a note and when?

How Astrid handles it, and where it is still general

Astrid captures calls through Zoom Phone, a dial-in bridge that works from any cell phone or landline, a meeting bot for Zoom, Meet and Teams, and recording in the browser. It matches each call to a matter, drafts a note in your firm's format, and waits for an attorney to approve it. The approved note files to the matter in Clio Manage, and follow-up items file as Clio tasks. It is $40 per person per month billed monthly, or $400 per year billed annually, with a 14-day free trial.

For litigation the eight original call types, including meet and confer, witness interview and settlement, have their own note templates, and civil litigation also gets discovery planning. A call type without its own template is drafted with your firm's default note template until you edit or bind one. Astrid's templates were first written for personal injury, so expect to adjust wording early, and test one meet and confer and one witness interview in the trial.

Using your own AI assistant with Astrid

Astrid has an MCP server, which lets an AI assistant you already use, such as Claude, connect to your firm's Astrid record. MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is an open standard that lets an AI assistant such as Claude connect to another application through a server that the application provides.

Once connected, you can ask the assistant things like:

• What settlement authority did the client give in the last settlement call?
• What did the witness say about the date of the incident?
• What did opposing counsel agree to on the meet and confer call?

It works with the access of the person who connects it, so firm scoping and privileged-call restrictions apply the same way they do in the app. Marking a call privileged is off by default, so decide your rule first.

One caution applies to any tool like this: connecting an assistant means the content it reads goes to that assistant's provider. Treat that provider like any vendor that sees client content, and check its training and retention terms first, as the NYC Bar's opinion on AI tools advises.

Sources

• NYC Bar Formal Opinion 2025-6
• Summary of ABA Formal Opinion 512
• Justia 50-state recording survey
• Heppner and Warner overview, Perkins Coie
• In re Otter.AI Privacy Litigation, order of August 13, 2026
• Federal courts on recording and broadcasting proceedings
• Non-stenographic recording of depositions, M.D. Fla. discovery handbook
• Clio on flat fees and on civil litigation software
• Astrid security, recording consent and Clio integration
• Model Context Protocol

Frequently asked questions