Updated 2026-09-22
Michigan call recording law
Michigan is a contested — treat as all-party state under Mich. Comp. Laws § 750.539c.
The statute reads as all-party, but Michigan courts have held that a participant in a conversation is not an eavesdropper under it.
Worth knowing
The safer course is to disclose. Practitioners disagree about how far the participant exception reaches.
What this means for a law firm
You cannot record an incoming call in Michigan on your own consent alone. The caller has to be told, and the telling has to happen before anything worth recording is said.
In practice this means a spoken notice in the first sentence — not a line in a privacy policy the caller has never read, and not a beep. Several all-party statutes, Washington’s most plainly, treat a recorded announcement at the start of the call as the consent mechanism.
The interstate problem is the real one. A firm in Michigan takes calls from outside Michigan, and courts have applied the stricter state’s rule in that situation. Announcing the recording on every call removes the question rather than answering it.
How ClerkBird handles it
ClerkBird opens every call with the same sentence, before it asks anything: “Thanks for calling [firm]. I’m an AI assistant, and this call is recorded. How can I help you today?”
That line is enforced in code. It is not a setting, and a firm cannot edit it out — which is the point: a disclosure that any customer can disable is not a compliance control. It also covers the second obligation, bot disclosure, which California and other states impose independently of recording law.
Firms that would rather not hold audio at all can set retention to zero, and ClerkBird keeps only the transcript.
Other contested — treat as all-party states
This page is a reference, not legal advice, and it is not a substitute for reading Mich. Comp. Laws § 750.539c. Statutes are amended and courts reinterpret them. Confirm the current rule with counsel licensed in Michigan before relying on it.