A records request rarely arrives labeled as one. It is an email from an adjuster asking for "everything you have on the Whitaker job." It is an attorney''s letter. It is an owner''s rep who wants the walkthrough from March. Occasionally it is your own customer, two years on, selling the house.
Whatever the wrapper, it is the same thing: a deadline attached to a filing decision you made a long time ago and probably were not thinking hard about at the time.
Work out what is actually being asked
Before you send anything, get the request into specific terms, in writing.
Which property, which dates, and which kind of material — photographs, video, written reports, correspondence, all of it. "Everything you have" is not a scope, and answering it literally is how correspondence you never meant to produce ends up in somebody else''s file.
Then establish who is asking and on whose behalf. Your customer asking for their own inspection is a service request and you should just answer it. A third party asking for a customer''s records is a different question entirely, and the answer usually runs through the customer rather than around them. Sharing inspection video outside your company is the same problem wearing a different hat.
If a lawyer is involved on any side, that is the point to talk to your own before you send files. Not because you have done anything wrong — because production is easier to do once and correctly than to correct afterward.
Retrieval is where operations get graded
Here is the part nobody enjoys. The difficulty of a records request is set entirely by choices made before it arrived.
If inspections were recorded automatically to a company account, retrieval is a search. If they lived on whichever phone the inspector happened to carry, retrieval is an investigation, and it involves calling somebody who does not work for you any more. What happens to the archive when someone leaves is not a hypothetical question; it is the exact question a records request asks, just phrased politely.
The other half is retention. If the material is outside your retention window it is gone, and that is a legitimate answer as long as your policy was real, written, and applied uniformly. What is not defensible is deleting after the request arrives. The moment you know records are wanted for a dispute, routine deletion stops — including automatic deletion you set up and forgot about. That is the single most important sentence in this article. Stop deleting when a job goes wrong is worth reading before you are in one.
Produce it as a set, not a pile
How you hand material over changes how it reads.
Send it as an organized set with an index: what is included, the date of each item, the property, who captured it. Keep originals as originals — resized, re-compressed, re-exported copies invite questions about what else changed. If your material carries timestamps and access history, include that too, because provenance is most of what makes a record persuasive.
Say plainly what is not included and why. "Video is retained twelve months; the March 2025 session is outside that window." A stated gap is a policy. An unstated gap is a suspicion.
And keep a copy of exactly what you sent, with the date and the recipient. The second request, when it comes, will be about what was in the first one.
Where your job ends
You produce what you observed and recorded. You do not interpret it for somebody else''s claim, you do not opine on coverage, and you do not advocate an outcome — that is a licensed public adjuster''s work or an attorney''s, and in most states it is not lawful for a contractor to do it.
That boundary is a relief, not a limitation. It means a records request is an administrative task with a clear edge, and the only real question is whether your filing system can answer it in an afternoon or a fortnight.
The habits that make that an afternoon — automatic capture, company-side storage, a retention policy somebody actually wrote down — are on the security page, and the use cases page covers what they look like on a working crew.
InspectStream records what an inspector observed. It is not a public adjusting service and does not prepare, negotiate, or advise on insurance claims.