Meeting notes for lawyers, kept on your own Mac

Lawyers spend a lot of time in meetings where the notes matter: client intake, strategy calls, negotiations, witness preparation. An AI note taker can save hours of writing up. It also raises a question most tools skip over: where does the recording of a privileged conversation go?

This page covers what to think about before using any AI note taker in legal work, and how Hearkeeper, a Mac app that is not released yet, is built to keep the meeting on your own computer.

The problem with cloud recorders in legal work

Most AI meeting assistants record the call, upload the audio, and have it transcribed and summarised on the vendor’s servers. Some send a bot into the meeting to do the recording. That model works for a lot of meetings. For a lawyer, it adds a third party to a confidential conversation.

That matters for a few reasons:

• Confidentiality is a duty, not a preference. In the United States, the ABA Model Rules ask lawyers to “make reasonable efforts to prevent the inadvertent or unauthorized disclosure of, or unauthorized access to, information relating to the representation of a client” (Model Rule 1.6(c)). Other jurisdictions have their own versions of the same idea.
• AI tools are now on the ethics agenda. The ABA’s Formal Opinion 512 (July 2024) discusses how existing duties, including confidentiality and competence, apply when a lawyer uses generative AI. It explains that some tools can expose client information in ways that call for the client’s informed consent before it is entered.
• Privilege questions are easier to answer when nobody else holds the recording. Whether sharing a conversation with a service provider affects privilege is a legal question for your jurisdiction, not for a software vendor. But the fewer copies exist, and the fewer parties hold them, the less there is to argue about.
• Retention is harder to control. Once audio sits on a vendor’s servers, how long it stays there, who can access it and whether it is used to improve the vendor’s models depend on that vendor’s policy and settings.

None of this means lawyers cannot use AI note takers. It means the questions about where the data goes should be answered before the first client meeting, not after.

These are general points, not legal advice. Follow the rules of your own bar, law society or regulator, and your firm’s policies, on recording, confidentiality and the use of AI tools.

How Hearkeeper keeps the meeting on your Mac

Hearkeeper is built so that the whole pipeline runs on your own computer.

Recording without a bot. Hearkeeper records your microphone and your computer’s audio directly on the Mac. No bot joins the call and nobody else installs anything. It works with Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Slack huddles, Webex and FaceTime, and for meetings in your office.

Transcription on the device. Speech is turned into text on your Mac with whisper.cpp, accelerated by Metal. You get live captions about 2–4 seconds behind the speaker, and after you stop, a final pass with Whisper large-v3 turbo replaces them and separates the speakers.

Notes from a local model. A language model on your Mac writes the summary, the decisions and the to-dos. No API key is needed. Every line points to the second it was said, so you can check a summary point against the recording before you rely on it. You can also ask questions across your meetings.

Nothing uploaded by default. Nothing leaves your Mac unless you connect a team server or your own API key. If you connect neither, the recording, the transcript and the notes stay on your disk, and it all works offline.

Consent comes first

Keeping a recording private does not replace telling people it exists. Recording laws differ between countries and states, and some require everyone in the conversation to agree. The page on recording meetings with consent covers the main rules.

Hearkeeper is built so that consent is not an afterthought:

• A consent step before every recording. Read a notice aloud, post it in the meeting chat, or both.
• A consent receipt is saved with the recording, so you can show later how people were told.
• A recording pill that is always visible, including in screen shares, and cannot be hidden.

Hearkeeper has no invisible mode and never will. If a client or opposing counsel asks whether you are recording, the answer is on the screen.

Retention and deletion stay in your hands

Because the files are yours, retention follows your own policy rather than a vendor’s:

• Audio and notes are ordinary files on your disk. Your firm’s backup, encryption and retention practices apply to them like any other document.
• Search is one SQLite file on your disk. Nothing is indexed in someone else’s system.
• Deleting is simple. If you never connected a server, deleting a meeting on your Mac leaves no cloud copy behind.

Check how your firm’s rules on file retention and client data apply to recordings. Some matters may call for keeping only the notes and deleting the audio; that is a decision for you and your client.

Export notes to Markdown for the file

Notes export to Markdown, a plain text format any editor or document system can open. That makes it easy to move a summary, a list of decisions or a set of action items into the matter file, a memo or your document management system, without being locked into our app.

Useful for client work in more than one language

Transcription covers 99 languages. Icelandic is first-class, and meetings that mix Icelandic and English are detected automatically, which helps if you work with international clients. See Icelandic transcription for more.

What Hearkeeper is not

• Not a certified system. Hearkeeper has no compliance certification of any kind.
• Not a practice management or document management system. It records, transcribes and writes notes; the matter file lives where it always has.
• Not a substitute for your judgement. A local model is smaller than the largest cloud models. Check anything important against the recording, which is why every line links to its moment.

Questions to ask any AI note taker

Before using any tool for client meetings, including ours, ask:

• Where does the audio go, and who can access it?
• Does it work with the network turned off?
• Is client data used to train the vendor’s models?
• Can I export everything in a plain format and delete it for good?
• How do the other people in the meeting know they are being recorded?

When is it available?

Hearkeeper is coming to the Mac first (macOS 14.2 or later, Apple silicon and Intel), with other platforms later. It is made in Reykjavík by Drangalia ehf.

If you want client meeting notes that stay on your own computer, join the waitlist and we will email you when there is a build for you.