Updated 2026-09-22
Oregon call recording law
Oregon is a contested — treat as all-party state under Or. Rev. Stat. § 165.540.
Telephone calls are one-party, but in-person conversations require that all participants be specifically informed.
Worth knowing
For a phone answering service the one-party rule applies, but the in-person rule makes Oregon worth reading carefully if calls are ever played aloud in a room.
What this means for a law firm
You cannot record an incoming call in Oregon 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 Oregon takes calls from outside Oregon, 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 Or. Rev. Stat. § 165.540. Statutes are amended and courts reinterpret them. Confirm the current rule with counsel licensed in Oregon before relying on it.