retention policy

Key Takeaways

• A retention policy specifies how long records are kept, who can access them, and what happens when the normal schedule must be overridden.
• Two situations override normal retention: a serious incident (preserve immediately) and a legal hold (nothing is deleted until counsel says so).
• A policy that exists but hasn't been communicated to drivers and dispatchers is not functioning.

Related documentation steps

Terms in this glossary are meant to keep reports, claim notes, and safety reviews using consistent language.

chain of custody · preservation · driver statement

Plain-English meaning

A retention policy is a written rule establishing how long records are kept before they are discarded or overwritten, who can access them during the retention period, and what triggers an exception — such as a legal hold — that extends normal retention.

Retention policies apply to dash cam footage, telematics records, ELD data, maintenance logs, incident reports, and any other operational record. Each record type may have a different retention period.

Why written policies matter

Ad hoc retention decisions create inconsistency that is hard to explain when a claim or investigation asks why certain records exist and others don't.

A written policy provides a defensible framework: records were kept or discarded according to a consistent rule, not selectively based on what each incident's outcome appeared to require.

Records that need separate schedules

Dash cam footage, ELD records, telematics exports, maintenance files, driver qualification records, drug and alcohol testing records, incident reports, claim correspondence, and training acknowledgments do not all share the same retention period.

A useful policy names the record type, normal retention period, storage location, access role, and exception trigger. Without those fields, people still have to guess when the record matters most.

Legal hold interaction

A legal hold stops the normal destruction or overwrite schedule for affected records. Once a hold is in place, the fleet should preserve the relevant files until the responsible legal contact releases the hold.

The hold should be specific enough to act on: incident date, vehicle, driver, record types, storage systems, and who is responsible. A vague instruction to keep everything can be as hard to follow as no instruction at all.