Using AI to summarize client meetings

Clients often blame counsel after losing a case or having a deal go south. They say their lawyer never gave them a particular option or followed their instructions. The lawyer disagrees. Often, these disagreements end up before the law society.

Lawyers try to avoid this problem by documenting what clients tell them and what they have told their clients. This can include anything from sending an email after a brief phone call with a client confirming the substance of the call to writing a more formal and detailed opinion letter.

Either way, the process is time-consuming and adds to the cost of a retainer, especially if it involves taking notes throughout a meeting and working through the notes afterwards. It’s also prone to some degree of error if a lawyer’s notes or memory of a meeting are not entirely accurate.

Some lawyers are beginning to experiment with using AI to help make this process more efficient and reliable. Various apps and tools can easily record a conversation with a client and produce a transcript and an AI summary in multiple formats.

This can make it easier and quicker to provide a client with a more accurate summary of the advice given and instructions received at a lower cost.

However, there are both ethical and practical considerations. Can we record our clients using AI, even with their consent? Would clients even want to be recorded?

Technical options and ethical obligations

First, how do you even do this?

Our phones all have recording apps that can capture a conversation and produce an audio file. We could then drop that file into a free AI tool like ChatGPT and ask it to transcribe or summarize the conversation in key points.

However, guidance from law societies on the use of generative AI —such as BC’s guidelines — makes clear that duties of confidentiality and candour require us to fully disclose our use of AI and obtain informed consent to any use we make of a client’s private information.

BC’s guidelines permit using an online platform like ChatGPT –- with informed consent –- but there’s a better option: using a tool that doesn’t upload client information to the cloud. This would still require informed consent, but a client might be more comfortable with it.

For example, Plaud.ai has a product that records conversations and produces AI summaries in one step. Plaud’s privacy policy says that recordings are only stored on the device but that when transcribing and summarizing, they “may need to be uploaded to servers for processing.” In this case, the “entire transmission process is encrypted, and user information is anonymized."

If you have a Mac with an M1 chip or later, or an iPhone with Apple Intelligence, it works in a similar way. The recording and AI processing can be kept on-device, except for “more complex requests,” which are routed to what Apple calls Private Cloud Compute. In this case, Apple says, “Only the data that is relevant to your request is processed on Apple silicon servers before being removed.”

Practical considerations

Admittedly, the idea of being recorded can be off-putting. It can make people self-conscious or distrustful. Many lawyers might think it’s a bad idea to ask clients to consent to being recorded to generate an AI summary where anything can happen to the sensitive data created, despite what Apple and other companies might say.

Why put clients in this position?

One answer is that clients will gain better service –- more accurate summaries of what was said, more quickly rendered, and all at a lower cost. Let them decide.

If several hours of billable time can be saved over the course of a retainer, some clients would likely agree to using AI for this purpose. But not all clients, and that’s fine. That doesn’t mean using AI this way is a bad idea. It does mean that we’re moving into new terrain here, which largely depends on a client’s degree of comfort and familiarity with AI.

Eventually, it seems likely that AI will take over more of the audio transcription we do in law. A good place to start is where it might work best for the client.