Documents are rarely in the physical form these days. Most documents are being created in the electronic format, and even physical documents are being converted into electronic formats. Several devices, such as CD/DVD ROMs, floppy disks, hard drives and tapes, are being commonly used to store documents. Document transfer is also in the electronic form through e-mails or the Internet and intranets.

When documents are created electronically, they are stored in temporary files. Even when they are deleted or updated, some remnants still remain on the hard disk, which can be recovered using special tools. Thus, data that is lost or overwritten can, in fact, be retrieved. This is an important aspect of electronic document discovery, which is being increasingly used in civil and criminal litigations to get useful evidence. Electronic document discovery is a very difficult task due to the sheer volume of data present in the electronic form. Collecting, sorting, categorizing and storing this data is an arduous task.

Computer forensic experts carry out electronic document discovery. These people deal with the preservation, identification, extraction and documentation of computer evidence. They use software tools for the retrieval of data from any kind of an electronic source. These tools are highly advanced and can categorize, search and sort for data in their native format. Reports can be generated within minutes, and documents can be redacted. Electronic document discovery and management has become indispensable today. The electronic document discovery market was worth $1.3 billion in 2004.

Some of the electronic discovery tools are: Concordance (Dataflight Software Inc.), Summation (Summation Legal Technologies Inc.), CaseMap (Bowne DecisionQuest (CaseSoft)), Access (Microsoft Corp.), Attenex (Attenex Corp.), Encase (Guidance Software Inc.), iConect (iConect Development), Introspect (ZANTAZ Inc.) and LiveNote (LiveNote Technologies).