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The Logs Can Be Shredded in Six Months. The Inspection Reports in Three

Truck accident
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TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE!

Two clocks start running when a truck crash happens, and only one of them is on your side.

The first is the human one. Surgery. The ICU waiting room. Whether he's going to walk. Whether she's going to wake up. Insurance adjusters calling before you've slept. Funeral arrangements, if it went that way. That clock moves at whatever speed a family can stand.

The second one is a set of federal record-retention periods that started at the moment of impact and doesn't care about the first one at all.

What a trucking company is allowed to throw away, and when

Carriers have to keep certain records. They're also free to destroy them once the required period runs out. Here's the schedule.

Record

Rule

Required retention

Driver vehicle inspection reports

49 C.F.R. § 396.11

3 months

Records of duty status and supporting documents

49 C.F.R. § 395.8(k)(1)

6 months from receipt

Maintenance and repair records

49 C.F.R. § 396.3(c)

1 year where the vehicle is housed, plus 6 months after it leaves the carrier's control

Accident register

49 C.F.R. § 390.15(b)

3 years

Driver qualification file

49 C.F.R. § 391.51(c)

Employment plus 3 years

Driver investigation history file

49 C.F.R. § 391.53

Employment plus 3 years

The top two are the problem.

Three months for driver vehicle inspection reports. Those are the daily write-ups where a driver records the condition of the brakes, the steering, the tires, the lights, the coupling — and where the company certifies it fixed whatever he reported. If somebody flagged a brake problem and nobody did anything, that's the piece of paper that says so.

Six months for records of duty status and supporting documents. The regulation says it flatly: "A motor carrier shall retain records of duty status and supporting documents required under this part for a period of not less than 6 months from the date of receipt."

Supporting documents are what make a driver's log testable against reality. Fuel receipts. Weigh station records. Toll transactions. Bills of lading. Dispatch messages. Delivery timestamps. All the ordinary paper that establishes where a truck actually was, and when — which either backs up the log or blows a hole in it.

Six months after a catastrophic wreck, a family may still be sorting out whether he's coming home. The records that would prove the driver had been up for nineteen hours can be legally gone by then.

And some of them have no retention rule at all

A lot of the most valuable material in a modern truck case isn't governed by any federal retention requirement.

  1. Engine control module data. Heavy trucks record speed, RPM, throttle, brake application and hard-braking events in the seconds before an incident. That data gets overwritten as the truck keeps running, and it's routinely lost the moment a truck goes back in service.
  2. Camera footage. Plenty of fleets run forward-facing and driver-facing cameras. What happens to that footage is entirely up to the company. Some systems overwrite on a cycle measured in days.
  3. Dispatch messages. Every communication between the office and the cab, timestamped. Retention set by the carrier and whatever software vendor it uses.
  4. GPS and telematics. Usually held by a third-party vendor under a contract the carrier controls.
  5. The vehicles. Trucks get repaired. Trailers go back in service. Your car gets sold to salvage. Tire condition, brake lining thickness, the tiedowns, the rear impact guard — all of it disappears on an ordinary commercial schedule unless somebody steps in.

Mississippi's spoliation law, and where it stops

Mississippi doesn't have a standalone lawsuit for destroying evidence.

In Dowdle Butane Gas Co. v. Moore, 831 So. 2d 1124 (Miss. 2002), the Supreme Court refused to create one for intentional destruction, for negligent destruction, or against parties or non-parties. The Court held that "sufficient remedies exist for litigation-related misconduct such as spoliation of evidence," pointing to the spoliation inference (a jury can infer the destroyed evidence would have hurt whoever destroyed it), sanctions under Rule 37, criminal liability under Miss. Code Ann. § 97-9-55, contempt, and bar discipline.

Those are real remedies. But look at what they're aimed at: destruction that happened after a duty to preserve kicked in. Routine shredding inside a lawful federal window, before anybody asked for anything, is a different situation entirely.

That's the whole argument for getting a written preservation demand out early. It's what turns ordinary housekeeping into something a court will treat as spoliation.

At Coxwell & Associates, once we get hired we immediately send the person driving and the company a Letter of Preservation. This letter advises the company they have a duty to save and retain all information in our letter. In Federal court there is also an Electronic Stored Information Protocol. But the attorney for an injured person has to put everyone on notice immediately.

The Mississippi deadlines

Separate from preservation, there are filing deadlines.

Personal injury: three years. Miss. Code Ann. § 15-1-49 — "all actions for which no other period of limitation is prescribed shall be commenced within three (3) years next after the cause of such action accrued."

Wrongful death: the statute borrows. Miss. Code Ann. § 11-7-13 has no limitations period of its own. In Jenkins v. Pensacola Health Trust, Inc. (Miss. 2006) the Supreme Court explained that "a wrongful death action, since it is predicated on an underlying tort, is limited by the statute of limitations applicable to the tort resulting in the wrongful death." For an ordinary negligence truck case that means three years under § 15-1-49 — but because it borrows, the answer changes with the underlying tort. It's a trap that has caught people.

Anything involving a government vehicle: much shorter. If the truck belonged to a city, a county, a school district, or a state agency — a garbage truck, a public works rig — the Mississippi Tort Claims Act applies. Miss. Code Ann. § 11-46-11 requires a notice of claim filed at least 90 days before you sue, and says, "all actions brought under this chapter shall be commenced within one (1) year next after the date of the tortious, wrongful or otherwise actionable conduct."

Ninety days' notice. One year to file. Miss either one or the merits of how good your case is stop mattering.

Why naming everybody matters so much here

Mississippi splits damages by percentage of fault and, as a general rule, does not impose joint and several liability.

Miss. Code Ann. § 85-5-7(2): "in any civil action based on fault, the liability for damages caused by two (2) or more persons shall be several only, and not joint and several," and "a joint tortfeasor shall be liable only for the amount of damages allocated to him in direct proportion to his percentage of fault." Subsection (4) keeps joint and several liability only for people who "consciously and deliberately pursue a common plan or design to commit a tortious act."

Responsibility in a truck case is usually spread around — the driver, the carrier, a shipper who loaded the trailer, a broker who booked the freight, a shop that did the brakes, sometimes a trailer owner who isn't the tractor owner. Under several liability each one pays only its own share. A party nobody identified is a share nobody recovers. And all of that identifying has to happen inside the limitations period, working from records that start vanishing at three and six months.

One thing that stops people from calling

Some people don't ask questions because they think they were partly to blame and figure that's the end of it.

Mississippi follows pure comparative negligence. Miss. Code Ann. § 11-7-15 says contributory negligence "shall not bar a recovery, but damages shall be diminished by the jury in proportion to the amount of negligence attributable to the person injured."

There's no cutoff percentage in the statute. Somebody found partly at fault still recovers, reduced by their share. Thinking you might have contributed isn't a reason to assume there's nothing there.

The first thirty days

If you're dealing with the aftermath of a bad truck wreck in Mississippi:

1. Get the crash report. Note the carrier's name and its USDOT number.

2. Photograph everything — both vehicles, the scene, the road, skid marks, debris, and the truck and trailer including the rear impact guard. Coxwell & Associates will handle this if we are involved early.

3. Write down who saw it. Names and phone numbers, before memories fade and numbers change.

4. Don't let anyone repair, sell or scrap your vehicle until someone has examined it. It's carrying its own crash data.

5. Keep every medical record and bill and write down what the injury is actually doing to daily life as it happens, not from memory six months later. (This is important).

6. Go slow on recorded statements to any insurance company, including your own, until you understand what happened. WE ACTUALLY INCOURAGE A PERSON TO MAKE NO STATEMENT TO ANY INSURANCE COMPANY UNTIL THEY SPEAK TO COXWELL & ASSOCIATES.

7. Get a written preservation demand to the trucking company fast -days, not months. It needs to name specifics: electronic logging device data, engine control module data, driver vehicle inspection reports, maintenance records, dispatch communications, camera footage, telematics, the driver qualification file, drug and alcohol testing records, and the vehicles themselves. Number seven is the one nobody thinks of, and it's the one with a clock on it. At Coxwell & Associates, a Letter of Preservation goes out immediately when we are asked to help.

The point

Nothing about burying somebody, or sitting in a hospital for three weeks, naturally leads a person to start thinking about federal record-retention schedules. We know this from our own personal experience. But a driver's daily inspection report can be destroyed ninety days after it was written, and his logs and the paper behind them at six months, and nobody will have broken a single rule doing it. What happened out there is knowable. It just isn't knowable forever.

Sources

This article is provided for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice, nor does it create an attorney-client relationship. Every case turns on its own facts. Statistics cited are drawn from the public sources listed and reflect the data years indicated; figures are updated periodically by the issuing agencies. If you have questions about a specific situation, consult a licensed attorney. Coxwell & Associates, PLLC, 500 North State Street, Jackson, Mississippi 39201. Free background information available upon request.

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