Virtual Data Room - VDR

In ye olde days, if one company wanted to buy out another, the lawyers would wheel in box after box of files. They'd pick through the mountain of documents, doing their due diligence, filling their desks with stacks of paper, strewing reams all over the furniture and floors of various conference rooms.

Nowadays, all that paper has mostly transformed into online documentation. However, lawyers and accountants still need to go over the information as part of their due diligence.

So they set up a virtual data room. It's a central place to store pertinent files, so that interested (and authorized) parties can sift through the information. It comes into play for things like mergers or private equity transactions.