Your security footage is your best witness — until it becomes the other side's. In "The Camera Cuts Both Ways," Don Carr and Jim Cords break down the two opposite dangers hiding in the same camera. Delete footage after a duty to preserve has attached, and routine auto-overwrite becomes spoliation — potentially an adverse inference where the jury is told to assume the missing evidence would have hurt you. Capture facial geometry without doing the legal homework, and biometric privacy laws like Illinois's BIPA can turn the recording itself into a per-violation claim. Too short, you've destroyed evidence; too long or captured wrong, you've created a privacy violation. The unifying lesson: retention isn't an IT setting — it's a legal decision, and someone who understands the stakes has to own it.

Loss. Liability. Law.