This is general information, not legal advice, and reflects Ontario law and Canadian federal law as of September 2026. Confirm current requirements directly with the Law Society of Ontario before adopting an AI notetaker for client meetings.
Recording the meeting is legal on its own
Canada is a one-party consent jurisdiction. Under section 184(2)(a) of the Criminal Code, a person who is a party to a private conversation can consent to it being recorded — no warrant, no court order, and no agreement from anyone else on the call. A lawyer sitting in their own client meeting is a party to it, so turning on a recording app is not, by itself, a wiretapping offence. That's the whole of what criminal law asks.
Feeding the recording to an AI tool is a separate question
An AI notetaker doesn't just record — it sends the audio to a third-party server, transcribes it, and often stores or summarizes what was said. That's the point where the Law Society of Ontario's professional-conduct guidance takes over from criminal law. Its April 2024 white paper on generative AI tells licensees to anonymize client information before it goes into a third-party tool, and where anonymizing won't adequately protect confidentiality or privilege, to explain the risks to the client and get informed consent first.
A live client conversation is the one input that guidance can't be applied to in the usual order. You can redact a document before uploading it; you can't un-say a client's name, a spouse's name, or the facts of their file mid-sentence before a microphone picks it up. That collapses the LSO's two-step test to one step: if the information can't be anonymized before it reaches the tool, the guidance says get informed consent before the tool runs, not after the meeting ends.
What that means in practice
Three things follow directly. Tell the client before the recording starts — one sentence at the top of the call does it, and it doubles as your own record that consent came first. Know where the audio and transcript actually go before picking a tool; most AI meeting-note products route data through servers outside Canada, and that's exactly the kind of data-handling detail the guidance says to understand before client information goes in. And if a client says no, that settles it — recording without consent doesn't breach the Criminal Code, but running the file through a tool the client explicitly declined breaches the confidentiality duty the criminal-law question was never testing in the first place. The same third-party-disclosure logic shows up in whether AI research tools put privilege at risk — a live meeting just puts the question in real time instead of on a document.