Meeting minutes, AI minutes, open meetings law and the public record, for clerks in cities, towns, counties and school boards.
Write your minutes in minutes, not hours.
General-purpose AI tools make things up and miss things. In our testing they got about 20 percent of the minutes right, and even 80 percent is not good enough for a public record. The guardrails a minutes tool needs.
Read the postTurnover, a vacancy or a busy season can leave a board with months of meetings and no approved minutes. Illinois wants minutes approved within 30 days, Michigan wants drafts out in 8 business days, and New York in two weeks. Here is what the law says about late minutes, a triage plan for the stack, and how to approve old minutes so the record holds up.
Read the postMinutes don't only land on the clerk. Town administrators, deputy clerks, board secretaries and volunteers write them too, often on top of a full job. Who actually does the work, who the law holds responsible, and what to do if the job was just handed to you.
Read the postSeveral parts of every minutes entry exist before the meeting starts, and open meeting laws describe the notice and the minutes by the same subjects. Treat each agenda item as the header of its future minutes entry, and the clerk's time goes where it belongs: the discussion and the votes.
Read the postNo state requires your minutes to say AI helped draft them, and the statutes usually cited are about chatbots, not drafting tools. But the “AI-generated, may contain errors” footer boards keep reaching for is a disclaimer of accuracy on a document whose whole legal value is accuracy. Put the policy on the record instead.
Read the postThe minutes become the official record when the body votes to approve them, not when the clerk finishes writing. Before that vote the draft is already public. After it, the record cannot be quietly edited: a correction takes a motion, a vote, and in Michigan a visible trace of the change itself.
Read the postMost clerks inherit a minutes template and never find out which parts of it the law requires. Iowa, Delaware and Virginia were drafted independently and ask for substantially the same four things. Only one of the three requires a summary of the discussion, and that single question is the difference between a twenty-minute document and a three-hour one.
Read the postThe most revealing question you can ask an AI minutes vendor is not how accurate it is, but how many things it will ask your clerk to check. A tool that returns all 35 items for confirmation has not done the work, it has moved the work. Medicine already ran this experiment: an aid that marks everything failed to improve accuracy across 323,973 screenings, and degraded the best readers on the hardest cases.
Read the postEveryone sizes the minutes problem by population. That's the wrong denominator. Workload scales with the number of public bodies you carry, and open meeting law defines a public body by what it does, not how important it is.
Read the postTurnover among chief local election officials hit 41% in 2024, the highest in two decades of data, and 46% of governments say the biggest retirement wave is still ahead. What actually breaks when a long-serving clerk leaves is not the procedure. It is the knowledge nobody wrote down, including who is speaking on the recording.
Read the postOhio's Sunshine Law never requires a public body to publish an agenda, and notice of a regular meeting is time and place, full stop. Ohio moved its legal weight to the back end: the minutes standard, the executive-session motion, and a $500 forfeiture.
Read the postThe annual license is the smallest number in the contract. The implementation fee, the archive migration, the yearly escalator, the storage overage, the staff hours, and the cost of getting your data back out are where the money actually goes. A line-by-line TCO worksheet to bring to every demo.
Read the postSpeech-to-text has gotten very good at what was said. Knowing who said it is the hard part, and it matters most on one-word roll-call votes. Most tools make you re-label speakers every meeting. Remembering voices across meetings fixes that.
Read the postAI can turn a three-hour meeting into a clean draft in minutes. But a model can also invent a sentence no one said or pin a vote on the wrong member, and once your board approves the minutes, that becomes the legal record. Why the human-approval step is the whole ballgame.
Read the postIllinois gives an ordinary citizen something almost no other state does: a way to get a binding legal ruling against your board without hiring a lawyer. Between the Section 2.02 agenda rule, the Attorney General's Public Access Counselor, and the disaster-declaration remote-meeting framework, Illinois is the most enforced open-meetings regime in the country.
Read the postFor fifty years Washington's OPMA required no agenda. Then ESHB 1329 added one in 2022, RCW 42.30.077, a 24-hour online agenda rule, and deliberately made it nearly unenforceable. Why the legislature did both, and what it means for regular and special meetings.
Read the postNew York requires no agenda, which surprises clerks from other states. The obligations that actually bind are the Section 104 notice rule, the Section 103(e) 24-hour document-posting requirement added in 2021, and the Section 103-a videoconferencing framework.
Read the postEvery California clerk can recite the 72-hour rule and the no-action-on-non-agenda-items rule. Far fewer can walk through AB 2449's teleconferencing framework, the Sec. 54957.5 packet-disclosure standard, or the cure-and-correct demand under Sec. 54960.1.
Read the postEvery Texas clerk can recite the 72-hour rule. Far fewer can name the case law that defines "sufficiently apprises," the population thresholds that trigger Sec. 551.056 website posting, or the 2019 amendments that rewrote how walking-quorum prosecutions work.
Read the post"Reasonable notice" is the statutory phrase. Decades of AG opinions and appellate decisions have given it a much more specific meaning than the words alone, and the digital posting era added a layer the original drafters never anticipated.
Read the postWhat Colorado's digital accessibility law expects of the documents you post, including agendas, packets and minutes, where most clerks are still exposed, and how to close the gap before a complaint forces the issue.
Read the postAcquisitions and consolidation are part of the software landscape. How to read a contract for renewal, bundling and auto-renewal terms, and the questions worth asking any vendor before you commit to a multi-year deal.
Read the postWhat CivicPlus, Granicus Legistar, ClerkMinutes and Govably each do with your meeting recording, who ends up finishing the minutes, and why speaker memory is the feature to test first.
Read the postWhat residents actually want after a meeting: the approved minutes, the exhibits, the recording, and a transcript they can search and click to jump straight to the moment a decision was made.
Read the postTitle II covers your meetings. Most clerks know that, but few know what it requires for notices, minutes, recordings, public comment and digital documents. Here is what compliance looks like in practice.
Read the postA practical plan for clerks ready to stop finishing minutes in Word. What to move first, what to leave behind, and how to bring the board along. If your AI tool still ends in a Word document, you haven't left Word.
Read the postStart with a quick demo. If you feel like it's a fit, we write minutes from one of your own meetings and go through them with you.