In 1964, futurist Arthur C. Clarke predicted that in 50 years, people “will no longer commute—they will communicate.” For a significant portion of the American workforce, the future is now. COVID-19 has fundamentally changed how we communicate: The virtual meeting is suddenly our primary means of interaction with coworkers. Video conferencing platforms like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Cisco’s WebEx have seen unprecedented spikes in active users. As companies transition from triage to planning for the new normal, the prevalence of video conferencing has serious implications for commercial litigation. Face-to-face discussions that were only memorialized by meeting notes or related correspondence can be fully preserved as video files, subject to discovery. It is therefore essential to understand the technical functionality of virtual meeting recordings and the likely legal obligations that accompany them.
