Glossary
Exhibit
Exhibit
An exhibit is any document, photograph, recording or physical object that a party puts in front of a court, a tribunal or a deposition, under an identifier such as 001 or A so that everyone in the room is looking at the same thing. The identifier is the whole point: it turns that email into Exhibit 004, which can be quoted in a transcript, ruled on, and found again a year later.
Calling something an exhibit says nothing about its evidentiary weight. It has been identified, not accepted. Usage also varies by jurisdiction and by context: in many courts an attachment to a pleading, motion or affidavit is called an exhibit and lettered independently of anything used at trial, while in others the word is reserved for material offered in a hearing. Arbitrations and tribunals keep their own conventions again. Check what your court and your filing rules call the thing before you assume the reader means what you mean.
Example
In the fictional Smith v. Jones matter, one construction contract appears three times in three roles. It is Exhibit A to the complaint, an attachment identified by the pleading. It is Exhibit 4 to the deposition of Robert Jones, marked by the reporter when counsel handed it to the witness. And it is Exhibit 001 on the trial exhibit list, the number it carries into the courtroom. Same twelve pages, same Bates range of SMITH000001 to SMITH000012, three identifiers. Only the last one is what the trial team means when it says exhibit.
Practical context
Most of the work in a case is deciding which documents become exhibits and keeping the identifiers straight between stages. A document produced in discovery carries a production number; it may pick up a deposition exhibit number; it may then be renumbered for trial. Each renumbering is an opportunity for two people to mean different things.
The practical defense is a single list with one row per exhibit, maintained from one place. Start with the trial exhibit list template, and settle the identifier scheme early using how to number trial exhibits.
In Exhibit Room
Exhibit Room is organized around exhibits rather than around files. A trial holds exhibits; each exhibit has a number, a name, a description, one PDF and a status. That mapping is deliberate, because it is the unit that gets referred to in court.
Two boundaries are worth knowing. Each exhibit holds exactly one PDF, so multi-part documents must be combined before import, and PDF is the only format accepted, so photographs, spreadsheets and other material are converted first. See exhibit organization for how a set is arranged.
No credit card required · Works offline · No subscription