By Lee Flanagan
✨ AI Summary:
- Interview recordings carry higher legal risk than internal meetings because candidates are external, protected characteristics surface naturally, and recordings can become evidence in hiring disputes.
- Most employers treat recording consent as an afterthought without mapping who accesses recordings, how long they’re retained, or whether they feed into vendor AI model training pipelines.
- Speaker-identification features in AI notetakers may trigger separate biometric privacy laws (such as Illinois’ BIPA) beyond standard recording consent, creating distinct compliance exposure.
- Governance beats bans: vet tools before interviews, disable biometric features where risk outweighs benefit, require explicit consent notices, set short retention windows, and document clear policies on where these tools are permitted.
Granola’s own marketing copy told prospective customers that other people on a call “won’t know it’s there.” Plaintiffs cite that line in a federal court filing as evidence, according to the complaint, that the company built its product around avoiding disclosure rather than defaulting to it. Chamberlain v. Granola is a proposed class action filed July 30 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. According to the complaint, the AI meeting notetaker recorded conversations without telling most participants and fed those recordings into its own model training by default, HR Executive reported. The case lands in the same district as the consolidated Otter.AI Privacy Litigation, which alleges Otter.ai recorded private conversations without consent from all participants and used them to train its models.
Two lawsuits, same district, same shape of complaint, and the pattern has little to do with artificial intelligence itself. It concerns what these tools assumed on your behalf the moment someone hit record inside a candidate conversation.
The Website Copy Is Now Exhibit A
Plaintiffs’ attorneys argue the company chose the lack of disclosure deliberately, rather than stumbling into it as an oversight, according to the filing. The complaint also argues that visible recording indicators change behavior in interviews and client conversations. Neither case has reached a verdict, and both companies dispute the claims or have not yet publicly responded, according to the reporting.
Bradford Kelley, a shareholder at Littler Mendelson who has advised employers on the Otter.ai litigation, told HR Executive in April that the issue is drawing serious attention from clients. “The AI transcription and recording issue is a hot issue,” he said, adding that human resource teams should be very interested in this case. Whatever a court eventually decides, the allegation should concern any TA leader running these tools inside an active interview loop.
Why an Interview Is a Riskier Room Than a Meeting
Our read is that Otter.ai and Granola were built with internal meetings in mind, not interviews. Neither complaint describes any hiring-specific safeguard. That distinction matters. An interview is a categorically riskier room than a standup: candidates are external to your organization, protected characteristics surface in natural conversation, and a recording can become evidence in a hiring dispute in ways an internal sync rarely does.
In our work with hiring teams, recording consent for interviews gets treated as an afterthought. Someone enables a notetaker because it is convenient, not because anyone has mapped what happens to that recording, who can access it, or how long it sits in a vendor’s training pipeline.
The Consent Problem Nobody at Your Company Mapped
Consent law is not one rule. It varies by federal and state statute. A meeting with candidates or employees across state lines can trigger overlapping consent obligations most employers have never mapped, according to Littler Mendelson’s analysis of the Otter.ai case. The Granola complaint leans on California’s Invasion of Privacy Act, which allows statutory damages of $5,000 per violation or three times actual damages, whichever is greater, and describes a proposed class reaching into the millions, PPC Land reported.
Model training is opt-out rather than opt-in on many notetaker plans, and the opt-out applies only going forward. Granola’s own materials acknowledge it cannot confirm a user’s data was excluded from training before the setting changed, or isolate specific data from an already-trained model, according to the complaint. Those whose voices get captured are often not the account holder, and a candidate on someone else’s call has no setting to adjust.
There is also a biometric layer most employers have not priced in. Littler’s analysis of the Otter.ai case finds that speaker-identification features may fall under state biometric privacy laws such as Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act. Granola’s complaint describes a similar speaker-attribution feature, according to PPC Land reporting. That risk is distinct from the question of recording consent, and it deserves its own line in any AI notetaker policy.
You Cannot Ban the Tools, So You Have to Govern Them
Littler’s own advice is not prohibition. Employers cannot realistically ban AI notetakers and expect compliance, the firm argues, pointing to survey data showing one in five professionals already use AI to draft meeting notes. Employees bring these tools to meetings whether or not a policy exists, so the fix has to be governance rather than a ban. Littler recommends:
- Vet the tool before it reaches an interview.
- Turn off voice identification where the biometric risk outweighs the benefit.
- Put a consent notice in front of every meeting instead of treating it as optional.
- Set short data retention windows.
- Write a policy on where these tools are and are not permitted, particularly in interviews, terminations and internal investigations.
Multinational employers face a stricter bar, though this sits apart from what either lawsuit itself alleges. GDPR requires a valid lawful basis and clear notice for meeting recording and AI processing. The EU AI Act may classify AI systems used for worker monitoring as high-risk, a category Littler says could reach notetakers offering sentiment or productivity scoring. In Germany, France and other co-determination countries, Littler advises that rolling out an AI notetaker can require works council consultation before deployment, a step with no real U.S. equivalent.
Our read is that neither product, as built, accounts for a candidate’s consent, and the biometric-statute risk that Littler Mendelson’s analysis flags for Otter.ai extends to Granola as well, according to PPC Land’s reporting.
Ask yourself plainly: if a plaintiff’s attorney subpoenaed your interview recordings, could you produce a consent record, a defined retention window and a policy naming who reviewed the transcript? If the honest answer is no, the lawsuit against Granola is not really about Granola. It is about the assumption already sitting inside your own interview process.
Original reporting: HR Executive.
Frequently asked questions
Does turning off AI model training in a notetaker delete data already used to train the model?
Not according to the Granola complaint. It cites the company’s own materials acknowledging it cannot confirm a user’s data was excluded from training that occurred before the setting was changed, and that isolating specific data from an already-trained model is not achievable with current techniques.
Is biometric consent the same as recording consent?
No. Recording consent covers whether a conversation can be captured at all, while speaker-identification features that attribute transcript lines by voiceprint may separately trigger state biometric privacy laws, including Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act, according to Littler Mendelson’s analysis of the Otter.ai case.
Why does an interview panel spanning multiple states raise extra legal risk?
Recording consent rules vary by federal and state law, and employers should check every jurisdiction involved, per Littler Mendelson’s analysis. A remote candidate calling in from a different state than the recruiter can trigger consent obligations that Littler Mendelson says many employers have never mapped.
Should TA teams stop using AI notetakers in interviews altogether?
Littler Mendelson’s advice is not prohibition. The firm argues employers cannot realistically ban these tools given how widely employees already use AI to draft meeting notes, and recommends governance instead: vetting the tool, disabling risky features and setting clear retention and usage policy.
Do these lawsuits have implications outside the United States?
The lawsuits themselves are U.S. cases, but Littler Mendelson’s broader compliance analysis notes that GDPR requires a valid lawful basis and clear notice for meeting recording and AI processing, and that the EU AI Act may classify worker-monitoring AI as high-risk. Littler also notes that co-determination countries such as Germany and France can require works council consultation before an AI notetaker is deployed.