A guy I know got a letter from a homeowner's attorney about a deck. His first instinct, he told me later, was to go through his phone and clean things up. Not to destroy anything important, as he put it, just the junk photos and the voicemail where he sounded annoyed. He did not do it, because he called somebody first. That call was the best decision he made all year.
Here is the rule, and it is the only thing in this post I need you to remember. The moment you become aware of a dispute, or that one is probably coming, stop deleting anything connected to that job. All of it. Then call a lawyer, that day.
I am a contractor, not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. I am not going to explain the legal reasoning behind this, because I am not qualified to and because you do not need the theory to follow the rule. How you handle records after a construction dispute is exactly the kind of thing you hire counsel for, immediately, before you make any decisions on your own.
Stop deleting. That includes the automatic deletion
This is the part people miss, and it can hurt worst, because it happens while you sleep.
A scheduled purge does not know that a letter arrived. It runs on a calendar. If you set up a window and did everything right, it is quietly counting down on the exact job now in dispute, and it will close on schedule unless somebody stops it.
So the first hour goes like this. Change the retention setting so nothing on that job is removed, and confirm in writing with your vendor that it is done, before the window and its grace period run out. Our window is configurable per company and media is deleted after that window plus a grace period, so there is time to act. Do not assume anything about timing. Get confirmation.
Then find every other thing that deletes without being asked. The phone setting that removes old text threads. The camera roll cleanup app. The job software that auto-archives closed jobs. The email rule that empties a folder. The tech who wipes his phone every Friday.
And tell your crew, in writing, today: nothing related to this job gets deleted, edited, or cleaned up by anyone until counsel says otherwise. Do not deliver that verbally to one person and consider it handled.
Recognizing a dispute earlier than you would like
The rule only works if you notice in time. Most contractors notice late, because the early signals do not look like a lawsuit. They look like a bad week.
A letter from an attorney. Somebody saying my attorney, or my son is a lawyer. A stopped payment or a chargeback. Anything sent certified. A complaint to a licensing board or a consumer agency. A written demand for a refund with a date attached. A homeowner who used to call you every day and now only sends carefully worded emails. A general contractor issuing a backcharge. Somebody getting hurt on your site. An engineer or an unfamiliar third party asking about a property you worked on. Any sentence ending with figuring out who is going to pay for this.
You do not need certainty and you should not wait for it. Suspicion is enough to trigger the preservation reflex, and the downside of being wrong is that you kept some files you did not need. Priced out honestly, that is a phone bill. The downside of the opposite mistake is not a phone bill.
How you handle records after a construction dispute is decided in the first day, usually before you have any idea how serious it is.
If there is an insurance carrier anywhere in the picture, that is between the homeowner and their insurer. I document what I observed on the property. I am a contractor, not a licensed public adjuster, and in most states that distinction is a real legal line rather than a formality.
Preserving records after a construction dispute means more than video
People hear preserve and think about the inspection footage. The footage is a fraction of it.
Photos, in every place they live, including the ones you texted. Video. Text threads. Voicemails. Emails, including on a personal account. Estimates and revisions. Change orders. Signed documents. Material invoices and delivery tickets. Crew time records. Subcontractor paperwork. Handwritten notes in the truck. The phone itself, if it holds anything relevant.
And a specific warning about the media: do not edit it. Do not trim, crop, re-export, compress, annotate, or reorganize the files to make them easier to look at. Do not clean anything up. Whatever instinct tells you to tidy the record before a professional sees it, ignore it completely.
Do not send footage to anyone, including the other side, without your lawyer telling you to. Be deliberate about who inside your own shop can reach it in the meantime, which is the access side of the same problem. How storage and access work in our system is on the security page, which your lawyer may want to understand early.
Preserve first. Reply second. Those happen in that order.
Storage cost is not what you should be thinking about right now
Everything else written about retention involves tradeoffs. How long, how much, what it buys. This does not.
Whatever you would save by clearing that job off a drive is nothing. It is a couple of dollars. Set against that is the possibility of standing in a room where somebody is being paid, professionally, to make the words I deleted it sound as bad as they can possibly sound. There is no version of that trade that works out for you.
So: preserve everything, stop every automatic process touching that job, put the instruction to your crew in writing, and call a lawyer licensed where you work today. Not next week. This is not legal advice and I cannot tell you what your obligations are. I can tell you that every contractor I know who handled this well called counsel before doing anything else, and the ones who handled it badly handled it alone, on a phone, at eleven at night.
The boring version
All of this is far easier if the policy already exists. When you know where everything lives, preservation is a couple of settings and one message to the crew. When you do not, a dispute is a terrible time to find out that three years of records were on a phone belonging to a guy who quit in March.
That is the argument for doing this work while nothing is wrong. Set a retention policy with a lawyer, write it down, let the software run it, and know where things are. The overview is in inspection video retention.
Then if a bad letter shows up, all you have to do is stop, preserve, and pick up the phone.
InspectStream records what an inspector observed. It is not a public adjusting service and does not prepare, negotiate, or advise on insurance claims.