Is New Hampshire a two-party consent state?

N.H. Rev. Stat. Ann. §§ 570-A:1 and 570-A:2 reach both telecommunications and oral in-person communications. RCFP reports an expectation-of-privacy limit on the oral branch, with no consent needed for public conversations, and notes that senders of email and instant messages implicitly consent because recording is inherent in the recipient reading the message.

On what consent looks like, the sources disagree in emphasis and neither supplies a case name. One specialist secondary source states consent "does not have to be spoken aloud", that courts have found valid consent where the circumstances show a party knew recording was happening, and offers a stated notice or a recorded tone at the start of the call as the example, while cautioning that implied consent is riskier than explicit agreement. The New Hampshire courts' own law library guide says flatly that recording face-to-face or telephone conversations is a crime with "no one party consent exception", and cites no case law on what consent looks like.

The MWL chart cites State v. Locke, 761 A.2d 376 (N.H. 1999), for consent found where surrounding circumstances showed the party knew of the recording. That is consistent with the specialist source but was not independently verified. Treat the implied-consent reading as unverified and get an answer.

Both a felony and a misdemeanour track exist, and the sources draw the dividing line differently.

RCFP draws it by how many parties consented: one party's consent is a misdemeanor at up to a year and $2,000; no party's consent is a felony at up to seven years and $4,000. A specialist source draws it by mental state instead: wilful interception without all parties' consent is a class B felony reaching participants as much as eavesdroppers, while a participant who records only knowingly rather than wilfully commits a class B misdemeanor under § 570-A:2, I-a, which the State may elect to charge as class A before arraignment.

Both agree a felony is available in the first instance. We could not settle which line is right, because the legislature's site and Justia both refused fetches.

Private right of action under § 570-A:11: the greater of actual damages, $100 a day per day of violation, or $1,000, plus punitive damages, fees and costs.

No rule settles which state's law applies to a conversation spanning two of them, several may apply at once, and courts have reached opposite results on comparable facts. If anyone in the meeting is in New Hampshire, the practical answer is to satisfy New Hampshire. The general problem is on the US overview.

Said before the substance starts, so the consent is prior; asking a question, so an answer is on the record rather than inferred from silence; and offering a way out, which is what makes the answer mean anything.

Before we start: I'm recording and transcribing this meeting so I have accurate notes. It runs on my own laptop and nothing is uploaded. Is everyone okay with that? If anyone would rather I didn't, say so now and I'll turn it off.

Then leave a beat for an answer. Longer and shorter versions are on telling people you're recording.

Earkeep records continuously and announces itself to nobody: no bot in the participant list, no banner on anyone else's screen. Where every participant's agreement is what makes the recording lawful, that means the whole of the obligation sits on you saying something, and the app will not remind you.

What it gives you is somewhere to go when the answer is no. A pause from the live edge releases the microphone and the system audio stream, so your operating system's own recording indicator goes dark in front of the person who asked. A meeting on a connected calendar can be marked never-record, so a standing meeting is decided once. And a stretch of the day, or a saved meeting with its transcript, can be purged: the lines come out of the file on your own disk and nothing is written in their place, with no server copy anywhere. The one caveat is that it is not recoverable either.

None of that makes a recording lawful in New Hampshire. Consent law is about the recording, not about where it is stored, so the fact that transcription runs on your own device and the audio is never written to disk is not an answer to the statute. It is an answer to a different and often more pressing question in the room.

• RCFP, Reporter's Recording Guide: New Hampshire
• New Hampshire Courts law library guide
• Recording Law, New Hampshire

• US recording laws, state by state: the federal baseline, the cross-border problem, and all 51 jurisdictions.
• Telling people you're recording: the scripts, and the three ways to stop.
• Private by design: why the audio never leaves your computer.

This page is legal information, not legal advice. It summarises statutes and cases rather than replacing them, and we are not lawyers. If the answer matters, ask someone who can be held to their answer.