A Delaware court had both the official board minutes and the AI transcript of the same meetings. They did not match.

In August 2026 the Delaware Court of Chancery decided a case in which it had two records of the same board meetings: the official minutes, and AI-generated transcripts. The minutes described a defensive measure adopted to protect stockholders. The transcript quoted the chairman saying it was necessary for the board to remain in its position. Both came in through ordinary discovery as joint trial exhibits. Nobody challenged the transcripts’ reliability, and the court used them in assessing what the board was actually doing.

That is the whole argument for taking AI notetaker discovery seriously. Minutes are drafted, reviewed and approved. A transcript is not. It records what was said, including the sentence that would never have survived a redline.

Where these records live

Most of them are already inside Microsoft 365. Teams AI notes and Facilitator notes are stored as mailbox items with their own item class, which means they are searchable, holdable and producible through Purview eDiscovery — if the search is built to look for them. A standard mail-and-files collection will not return them. Third-party notetakers that join meetings as participants store their output elsewhere, often in a separate platform with its own retention settings and its own export limitations, which makes them a preservation problem before they are a collection problem.

Pro-Legal Services collects AI meeting notes alongside mail, chat and files as part of custodian collection. We handle eDiscovery services, forensic data collection, ESI processing, managed document review and defensible production for law firms and corporate legal departments in Washington DC, Maryland and Virginia, and we treat AI-generated records as a data source rather than a curiosity.

What to do about it now

• Inventory the notetakers. Find out what is running in your client’s meetings — native Teams AI notes, Copilot, Otter, Fireflies, Zoom AI, or something a department bought on a credit card.
• Name them in the hold. A litigation hold that says email, documents and messages does not obviously reach a transcript generated by a bot that joined a call.
• Check retention per platform. Native Microsoft notes follow your tenant’s retention. Third-party tools follow theirs, and the default is frequently short.
• Decide the policy question before the dispute. If a transcript and the minutes will diverge, counsel should know that before opposing counsel does.
• Expect the books-and-records question. Whether an AI transcript is a corporate record subject to a books-and-records demand has not been decided, and somebody is going to litigate it.

Why a litigation support vendor and not an IT team

An IT administrator can tell you where the transcripts are stored. What a matter needs is a preservation scope that names them, a collection that captures them with their metadata intact, a production that identifies them as what they are, and a documented record of how each step was performed. That is the gap, and it is the work we have been doing on new data sources since 1999 — first email, then chat, then collaboration platforms, now this.

If your client is running AI notetakers and you have an active hold, the records exist whether or not anyone has asked for them yet.

Related: AI document review for litigation, Teams data collection, Microsoft Purview eDiscovery, litigation hold services, forensic data collection, ESI processing, chain of custody for digital evidence, defensible production.

Pro-Legal Services, Inc. is an independent litigation support company in Arlington, Virginia, minutes from Washington DC, serving law firms, corporate legal departments and government agencies throughout DC, Maryland, Virginia and nationwide.

Running AI notetakers under an active hold? Tell us what tools are in use and we will tell you where the output lives, how long it survives, and what your preservation notice needs to say. Pro-Legal Services, Inc. · 1550 Wilson Blvd, Suite 250, Arlington, VA 22209 · 202-955-9400 · info@pro-legal.com