Guides
How to annotate exhibits for use in court
Markup is persuasion. An arrow pointing at the one line that matters does more work than a paragraph of argument, and a page covered in six colors of scribble does less than nothing.
This guide is for whoever will be drawing on the exhibits — often the lawyer preparing the examination, sometimes a trial-support colleague working from a marked-up printout. When you finish it you will know which mark to use for which job, roughly how much is too much, and how to keep the underlying document unaltered so nobody can accuse you of changing an exhibit.
Before you start
You need the exhibit set as final PDFs, the examination outline, and a decision from counsel about what each document is being used to prove. Markup without that decision tends to sprawl, because every fact on the page looks equally interesting when you have no target.
It also helps to know how the marks will be seen. A projector two metres wide forgives thin lines; a small monitor on the bench does not. Thicker strokes, fewer of them, and generous zoom beat fine detail on every courtroom display worth the name.
One question to settle before you draw anything: will the court and the other side see the annotated version, the clean version, or both? Some teams keep a clean copy of every marked-up document as a separate exhibit. In Exhibit Room annotations live separately from the file, so the imported PDF is never modified, and duplicating an exhibit gives you a second entry to mark up differently.
Step by step
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Start from a written markup plan
Write one line per exhibit: the page, the thing to emphasize, and the mark you intend to use. Doing this on paper keeps the total volume of markup honest, because a list of thirty marks looks excessive in a way that thirty individual decisions never does. It also lets a colleague execute the plan while you work on something else.
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Match the mark to the job
Text that will be read aloud wants a highlight. A physical feature in a photograph or diagram wants an arrow. A boundary — this column, this block of the page — wants a rectangle. A short note that needs to be legible from the back of the room wants a callout with a leader line. Exhibit Room offers highlight, pen, rectangle, arrow, text and callout tools, plus a visual redaction overlay that is only a presentation aid.
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Use one mark per idea
If you find yourself drawing a second arrow on the same page, ask whether the page is doing two jobs and should be shown twice instead. Sequential single marks are easier for a jury to follow than a composite diagram they have to decode. The discipline is the same one that makes a good slide.
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Draw at the zoom you will present at
A callout sized on a whole-page view is often tiny once you zoom to the paragraph, and an arrow drawn at 400% is a billboard at fit-page. Set the zoom you plan to use — fit width for text, fit page for photographs and plans — and draw there. In Exhibit Room the zoom controls in the viewer mirror the F and W keys in presentation, so what you draw is what will be shown.
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Keep the pen tool for genuinely freehand work
Freehand circling reads as informal, which is occasionally exactly what you want when a witness is being asked to identify something. For anything you have prepared in advance, a rectangle or an arrow looks deliberate and reproduces better on a low-quality projector. Mixing both on one page is usually a mistake.
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Adjust rather than redraw
Annotations should be movable. Select, drag, resize, edit the text, and undo when a stroke goes wrong. Exhibit Room supports moving, resizing, editing and deleting every annotation, with undo and redo, and it autosaves as you work — so there is no save step to forget before you close the exhibit.
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Review the whole set on the actual display
Plug the laptop into a screen of about the size you expect and walk the annotated pages. You are looking for marks that vanish, callout text that is too small, and colors that disappear against a scanned gray background. This is a ten-minute exercise that changes decisions.
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Present with the markup, knowing nothing can be edited by accident
Annotations are visible in Exhibit Room's presentation mode, and that view does not allow editing, so a stray click will not move an arrow in front of the jury. If you want to show the clean document first and the marked version second, use two exhibits or two copies. More on the behaviour of the drawing tools is on the PDF annotation page.
Examples
In the fictional matter of Smith v. Jones, Exhibit 018 is a one-page site diagram of a loading dock, and the disputed question is whether a delivery vehicle could have reached the rear entrance on the day of the incident.
The markup plan has three entries. An arrow from open space at the left of the diagram to the rear entrance, showing the claimed route. A rectangle around the bollard line that the defendant says blocked it. A callout reading "survey dated 11 Apr" anchored to the title block, because the date is the reason the diagram is relevant at all. That is three marks on a page that could easily have carried fifteen.
A second copy of Exhibit 018 is kept clean and duplicated as Exhibit 018A, so the witness can be asked what the diagram shows before being asked about the route. When the annotated version goes up, the difference between the two is the whole argument, and it takes one keystroke to move between them.
Related terminology
Marked-up pages used to explain testimony rather than to prove a fact are often offered as illustrative exhibits, and a document that has been given a number but not received is a marked exhibit — confusingly, "marked" in that sense has nothing to do with drawing on it. The underlying document remains an exhibit identified by its exhibit number however much annotation sits on top of it.
Frequently asked questions
Does annotating change the PDF file?
Not in Exhibit Room. Annotations are stored separately from the document, and the imported PDF is never modified. If you need a flattened annotated copy for another purpose, you would produce that in a PDF editor instead.
Can I hide my annotations and show the clean page?
There is no per-annotation visibility switch. The usual approach is to duplicate the exhibit and annotate only the copy, which also gives you a clean version to show first.
What happens to annotations when I replace the PDF behind an exhibit?
Treat a replacement as a fresh start and expect to redo the markup — page geometry rarely matches exactly between two versions of a document. Replace the file early in preparation rather than after you have annotated it.
Do annotations survive a transfer to another computer?
Yes. Exporting a trial produces a single .exhibitroom file containing metadata, PDFs and annotations, and importing it on another machine brings the markup with it.
Is there an annotation that permanently hides confidential text?
No. The redaction overlay is a black box drawn over the page for presentation only and does not remove anything from the file. How to redact a PDF explains what to use instead when a document must actually be sanitized.
Mark up an exhibit and see it on screen
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