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.

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.