A Relatively Strapping Lawsuit

A Relatively Strapping Lawsuit

While the rest of the internet spent this week following the story that dominated the real headlines – the saga of “Pablo Pledgescobar,” a Penn State accounting student (allegedly) running a massive cocaine ring out of his fraternity house – the labor and employment world (L&E-o-sphere?) had its own headline competing for attention. And what our story lacks in “accounting major turned alleged cartel-adjacent kingpin,” it more than makes up for with extreme secondhand embarrassment. If you’ve ever had a fear of accidentally sending a cringey message using reply-all, boy do we have a story for you . . .

By now, everyone is likely familiar with these seemingly ubiquitous AI-notetaker apps that accompany video calls like Zoom. They “enter” the chat, record what’s being said, and then typically create a transcript of the conversation which is delivered to the participants. One of these apps is called Fireflies.ai, and a New Jersey environmental services company used this app for their video calls, including termination meetings. (And yes, there will be NJ jokes. #IYKYK)

And so, this company fires a female employee over video call, tells her some version of it’s “not working out,” and sends her on her way. A little cold, devoid of emotional intelligence and strategy for our taste, but hey, culture and litigation-mitigation strategies aren’t for everyone.

Anyhoo – this company had also set up Fireflies.ai as the notetaker to transcribe the meeting . . . and nobody told Fireflies the meeting was over.

So after the employee logs off, the conversation keeps going. And keeps recording. And the three remaining executives allegedly start chatting about what the “ideal person” looks like for the now-vacant role, with one supervisor allegedly offering that the ideal candidate would “[h]opefully [be] a relatively strapping young man.”

Well, the notetaker did what it was supposed to do and emailed the entire transcript – post-termination commentary included – directly to the recently discharged employee. Yada yada yada and the former employee filed a lawsuit alleging gender discrimination under New Jersey’s Law Against Discrimination, seeking everything from reinstatement to punitive damages. Think this company will be using a notetaker for termination calls anymore? Fuhgettaboudit!

There are likely many, many . . . many takeaways from this story, but for purposes of this blog, two stand out:

First: be mindful of these AI things. We’ve spent years telling clients to be careful putting anything in an email they wouldn’t want blown up on a screen for a jury. AI notetakers, transcription tools, meeting assistants, whatever you want to call them: they don’t know when a conversation is “over,” they don’t know which parts of a meeting were the sensitive parts, and they’re tracking everything. If you’re using these tools at all — and by now, you probably are — build some actual awareness around when they’re on, what they’re capturing, and where that transcript ends up going. A little mindfulness here goes a long way.

Second, and this one’s less about the technology and more about the human beings using it: stop treating protected characteristics as a hiring metric, full stop. Whether or not an AI happens to be recording, “we’d like to replace her with a man” is not a sentence that improves with more privacy. It doesn’t become defensible in a hallway, in a text thread, or in someone’s head. If your ideal candidate is being described by demographics rather than qualifications . . . fuhgettaboudit. Every accommodation request, every termination decision, every “who should we replace them with” conversation needs to be built around job-related, non-discriminatory reasoning that would hold up regardless of who — or what — happens to be listening.

The lesson here? Don’t discriminate. (You’re welcome.) The only thing that’s changed is that now there’s a very earnest, very literal-minded AI in the room ready to write it all down, word for word, and forward it along.

That’s all for this one. Have a great weekend, everyone. As always, if you’ve got questions, you know we’ve got answers (unless your question is whether your AI notetaker is still recording right now – seriously . . . go check).

~ The W + K Team