All-party consent

All-party consent is a call recording standard under which every person on the call must agree before the call is recorded, so a business cannot record a customer call without the caller knowing. A number of US states use it, often under the name two-party consent. For phone calls they are California, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Washington, and Connecticut, Delaware and Michigan are mixed; our call recording laws by state guide gives the statute behind each. The list changes as legislatures and courts revisit it, so confirm your own state with counsel.

Why it matters for a service company

A plumber in one of these states who records calls the way a shop in a one-party state does, quietly, for later reference, is exposed on every recorded call. The exposure is not abstract: some of these statutes carry civil damages per violation, and a recording made without consent can be worthless as evidence in the very dispute you kept it for.

Consent in these states is usually built on notice. The caller hears a clear statement that the call may be recorded and stays on the line; in several of them that counts as agreement, though the details vary. What does not count is silence: a recording the caller never heard about is the problem the rule exists to prevent.

Geography makes it worse. You may be in a one-party state while the caller is in a stricter one, and a cell number says nothing about where they are. A shop near a state line, or one that gets calls from vacation homes and out-of-state landlords, meets the stricter rule without knowing it. The safe practice is to announce on every call and let the announcement do the work. This is a general description, not legal advice, and the list of states is not one to trust from memory.

How DispatchLine handles it

• Whenever recording is on, the agent opens every call by saying it may be recorded. It says this on every call, in every state, not only where the law requires it, so the disclosure never waits on a correct guess about the caller’s location.
• The announcement cannot be switched off separately. The only way to remove it is to disable recording entirely in the portal, which you can do without a ticket.
• When recording is on, the recording, transcript and two-line summary appear in the portal within about a minute of the call ending.

Read what the agent says in our call recording notice. Our guide to call recording laws by state lists the rule in every state and the District of Columbia, with the statute behind each.

Related terms

• One-party consent, the standard most states use.
• TCPA, the federal rule on automated calls and texts, a separate question from recording.
• Call recordings, what the portal keeps for each call.