In a trucking case the record that decides liability usually exists before you file suit, and the carrier controls all of it. Hours-of-service data, the dispatch log that shows when the load was promised, the driver qualification file with its history of prior stops and crashes — none of it comes to you voluntarily. It comes through a demand for production, a boilerplate set of objections, a meet-and-confer that goes nowhere, and then a motion to compel further responses under Code of Civil Procedure section 2031.310. How that motion comes out has less to do with the equities than with how the demand was written and how fast the preservation letter went out.
Reading a stack of these orders side by side, a pattern shows up. Judges grant the electronic logging demands almost reflexively when the retention rule is cited, split on dispatch records depending on how the temporal scope is drawn, and treat prior-incident discovery as a function of whether a direct-negligence claim is actually pleaded. The losing demands share the same defects each time.
ELD data: the retention rule does the work
Electronic logging device data is the cleanest of the three fights, because federal law removes the carrier's best argument for you. Under 49 C.F.R. section 395.8(k)(1), a motor carrier must retain records of duty status and the supporting documents for six months. The ELD file itself — the hours-of-service records the device generates under 49 C.F.R. section 395.22 — falls squarely inside that duty. A carrier cannot credibly argue that producing six months of the driver's duty logs is unduly burdensome when federal regulation already required it to keep exactly that data in exactly that form.
The demands that lose are the ones that ask for the raw device or the entire back-office telematics account without tying the request to duty status. The demands that win name the driver, name the window, and ask for the RODS and supporting documents the carrier was already obligated to hold. Relevance under section 2017.010 is not a close question here: fatigue and hours violations go to the driver's negligence and to the carrier's direct liability for putting him on the road. When a carrier answers "no responsive documents," the six-month rule converts that answer into either a preservation problem or an admission that the device was not in use — both of which help you.
Timing is the trap. The six-month clock runs from the date of the record, not the date of the crash, and it does not pause because a lawsuit is coming. If your preservation letter goes out in month five, the logs from the weeks before the collision may already be gone under a routine document-retention schedule that predates any duty to preserve. Send the litigation hold the day you are retained, and identify ELD, GPS, and telematics data by name.
Dispatch records and the economic-pressure theory
Dispatch records draw more resistance because carriers understand what they show. The pickup and delivery appointment times, the load tender, the messages between dispatcher and driver — that material is where a fatigued-driving case turns into a systemic one. If dispatch set a delivery window that could not be met inside the hours-of-service limits, the carrier's own paper builds the theory that the company pushed the driver past the point of safety.
The rulings here turn on scope. A demand for "all dispatch records" for a national fleet invites and usually earns a limiting order under section 2017.020, which lets the court restrict discovery when the burden clearly outweighs the likely benefit. A demand for the dispatch and load-tender records for this driver, this tractor, and the trip that ended in the collision — plus the driver's assignments for the days leading up to it — is proportionate on its face and hard to cut down. The economic-pressure theory needs the days before the crash, not the carrier's entire operation, and drawing the window that way keeps the burden objection off the table. The causation stakes are the same ones the Nebraska Supreme Court wrestled with in Werner v. Blake: whether the carrier's conduct, and not merely the truck's presence on the road, was a proximate cause of the harm.
Watch for the format objection. Dispatch data lives in transportation management software, and carriers like to print it to a flattened PDF that strips the timestamps and message threading. Demand production in the form in which it is ordinarily maintained, and say so in the request. A native or structured export preserves the metadata that makes the sequence legible; a PDF often does not.
Prior incidents: plead the direct claim first
Prior-incident discovery — other crashes, other complaints, the driver's history, the safety-department file — is the demand carriers fight hardest, and the one most often narrowed on relevance. The dividing line in the orders is whether the plaintiff has pleaded a direct-negligence claim against the carrier at all.
Where the complaint alleges only respondeat superior and the carrier has admitted the driver was in the course and scope of employment, courts frequently find prior-incident and hiring-file discovery marginal, because the company's liability rises and falls with the driver's fault regardless of what the safety file shows. Where the complaint pleads negligent hiring, retention, supervision, or entrustment as independent theories, the driver's record and the carrier's knowledge of it become directly relevant, and the discovery follows. The pleading controls the discovery. If you want the prior-incident file, the direct claim has to be in the complaint before you serve the demand, not added after the carrier objects.
Even with the claim pleaded, scope discipline still matters. Prior incidents that are similar in kind — fatigue, hours violations, the same category of unsafe conduct — are far more defensible than a demand for every claim ever filed against the company. Frame the request around substantially similar events and you keep the relevance argument on your side.
Spoliation is an evidence problem, not a tort
When the ELD data is gone or the dispatch records were purged, California will not give you a separate cause of action. The Supreme Court foreclosed an independent tort for intentional spoliation by a party in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center v. Superior Court (1998) 18 Cal.4th 1. The remedy lives inside the case: an evidentiary sanction, and the willful-suppression inference under Evidence Code section 413, argued to the jury through CACI No. 204. That instruction lets the jury infer the missing record would have hurt the party who lost it.
To get there you need to have created the duty to preserve and shown the breach. That is what the early, specific litigation hold is for. A letter that names ELD, GPS, telematics, and dispatch data, sent before the retention windows close, turns a "we don't have it" response into the predicate for a sanctions motion under section 2023.030 and a suppression instruction at trial. A generic "preserve all evidence" letter sent months later does neither.
Getting the motion granted
The procedural defects sink more motions to compel than the substantive ones. The motion to compel further responses to an inspection demand runs on a 45-day clock under section 2031.310, measured from service of the verified response, and the deadline is jurisdictional — miss it and the objections stand no matter how bad they are. The motion needs a separate statement under California Rules of Court, rule 3.1345, reproducing each demand, the response, and the reason further production is warranted. And it needs a real meet-and-confer, not a single form letter, because the declaration of a good-faith attempt is a prerequisite the court will check.
The demands that win read narrowly and cite the source of the retention duty. The federal preservation obligations that make ELD and RODS data discoverable sit inside the same regulatory framework this bar has watched shift over the past year, including the enforcement questions raised by the DC Circuit's stay of the FMCSA non-domiciled CDL rule. And because so many of these cases resolve on comparative fault once the carrier's conduct is on the table, the same discovery that proves the hours violation also shapes the allocation fight that follows, a calculus reshaped in states like New York by its 2026 modified comparative fault reform.
The through-line in the orders is unglamorous. Write the demand to the retention rule, draw the temporal window to the theory, plead the direct claim before you ask for the file, and send the hold letter the day you take the case. The motion practice is where trucking cases are decided, and the ruling almost always tracks the drafting.