I'm going through this situation at this moment -- well, for about two
years and still not very close to a resolution. Here are some of my
observations:

1) If you use contract language to impose records retention, be very
specific or there will be some wiggle room for interpretation or just
blatant non-compliant language. Also make sure you, as the records
manager, get to review the language and be sure it covers all the bases.
For example, who owns the data; how is it stored, preserved and
accessed; what is the data migration plan; disaster recovery plan; what
happens during litigation; what happens at termination of contract. 

2) If the contract was negotiated without records management input,
there are other issues to be addressed. For example, many services now
charge a per record charge for FTPs so you can do film or whatever. Or
I've had occasion where they basically say, this is our information and
we don't have to give it to you or retain it according to your schedule.
One outsource company we work with ignored a subpoena for our data, and
they legally can.

3) My strongest recommendation, if you can get top management to
understand and support you, is that you must maintain control over your
data and records even though the function may be outsourced. In
litigation, it is the company being sued who is liable for producing the
information or not. I would daresay all these outsource vendors who
claim they will manage the data will certainly not allow themselves to
be dragged into discovery and so forth, and does anyone even expect a
company to maintain your records if the contract has ended but the
retention period is still in force? And if you think they will then send
you your data, beware -- we have one vendor who for two years (despite
initially trying to make it look as if I didn't know my job to protect
theirs) has been unable to produce one week's worth of clean data for us
(for film) yet promised that if the contract ended they would send us
all our data. Hmmm...there' something wrong with that picture.

Dianne Hagan
Carrier Corporation

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