NYC Local Law 144 — Automated employment decision tools
Note: this explainer is informational and framework references are never a compliance guarantee — align your program with your legal counsel.
What Local Law 144 requires
In force since July 2023, NYC Local Law 144 prohibits employers from using an automated employment decision tool (AEDT) — a computational tool that substantially assists or replaces discretionary hiring or promotion decisions — unless the tool has undergone an independent bias audit within the past year, a summary of the results is publicly posted, and candidates receive advance notice of its use.
What it means for your company
The duties are tool-specific: you can only audit, post, and notify for tools you know you use. The gap in most organizations is not the formal ATS — it is the informal layer: a hiring manager scoring candidates with a general-purpose AI assistant is edging into AEDT territory without anyone flagging it for an audit.
How Shield operationalizes it
The Monitor AI use in HR decisions preset (referenced to NYC LL 144) logs usage of discovered HR and recruiting AI tools into the audit trail, and Discovery surfaces every new one for triage. Your compliance team gets the two facts LL 144 turns on: which tools are in play, and where they are actually used — before a candidate's lawyer asks.
Apply it via the preset library; it ships in the US AI in Employment bundle.
The outcome
A complete, current AEDT candidate list with usage evidence: audits get scoped correctly, notices reach the right processes, and nothing "substantially assists" a hiring decision from the shadows.
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