Last Update: 2026-9-8
eDiscovery — electronic discovery — is the process of identifying, collecting, and producing electronically stored information (ESI) for use in litigation, investigations, or regulatory proceedings. Most guides to eDiscovery tools (or e-discovery tools, depending on how you spell it) focus entirely on the review and analytics platforms lawyers use once data has already been collected. That’s only part of the picture.
Before any document, message, or piece of media reaches a review platform, it has to be collected in a way that preserves its integrity and chain of custody — otherwise its admissibility can be challenged regardless of how good the review software is. This guide covers both sides: a quick comparison of the leading eDiscovery review platforms, and — an area most eDiscovery guides skip, sometimes called eDiscovery forensics — the forensic collection tools and practices that determine whether the data reaching those platforms will actually hold up.
