Guides
How to organize trial exhibits before trial
Organizing exhibits is mostly a filing problem wearing a legal costume. The documents already exist; the work is deciding which ones make the cut, giving each a single unambiguous identity, and arranging them so that any member of the team can find any document without asking.
This is the paralegal's and trial-support coordinator's guide. At the end of it you will have a folder structure that survives contact with a trial, a naming convention that sorts correctly, one file per exhibit, and a list that matches reality rather than an earlier intention.
Before you start
Pull together the production sets you may draw from, the pleadings that tell you what is actually in dispute, the witness list, and any pre-trial order that sets an exchange deadline or a format. Ask counsel for a short written statement of the elements each witness is meant to establish; selection becomes much faster when you know what each document is for.
Formats are worth settling early. Exhibit Room imports PDFs and nothing else, which means native spreadsheets, word processing files and loose images have to be converted before they enter the set. Doing that conversion deliberately — choosing page orientation, print area and page breaks — produces better exhibits than letting a default setting decide. The document type guides walk through the awkward cases.
Agree on a naming pattern and write it down where the team can see it. A zero-padded number, a short human description and a date works well: 007 - Inspection Report - 2021-08-02.pdf. Zero padding matters because 10 sorts before 2 in every file browser on earth.
Step by step
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Cut the set down before you organize it
A produced set of ten thousand pages is not an exhibit set. Work from the elements and the witness list and mark candidates, then have counsel cut again. Organizing documents you will never offer is the most common way to waste a week of trial preparation.
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Decide what counts as one exhibit
An email and its attachment might be one exhibit or two; a contract and its amendments might be one or five. Make the call explicitly, document it, and then make the files match the decision. Exhibit Room stores one PDF per exhibit, so a decision to treat the amendments together means combining them into a single PDF before import.
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Build the physical folder structure once
One folder for the matter, a subfolder for source documents as produced, a subfolder for exhibit-ready PDFs, and nothing else. Resist per-witness folders at the file level: witnesses change order, and moving files around breaks links and confuses people. Ordering by witness belongs in your list, not in your filesystem.
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Create the trial container and import in bulk
Set up the matter in whatever tool you will present from before you have finished preparing every document, so that new files have somewhere to land. In Exhibit Room you create a trial with a case name, and optionally the case number, court and parties, then drag a group of PDFs onto the exhibit list to import them all at once. The file picker does the same thing if you prefer.
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Give each exhibit a number, a name and a description
The number is the identifier, the name is what a human calls the document, and the description is where the purpose lives — which witness, which element, which page matters. Exhibit Room numbers exhibits 001, 002 and so on by default and accepts any custom scheme you type instead, such as A, P-12 or A-1. The conventions are compared in how to number trial exhibits.
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Put the exhibits into presentation order
Reorder the set to match the order you expect to use it in, usually grouped by witness and then by the sequence within that examination. This is the arrangement that makes a trial day calm. Exhibit Room lets you drag exhibits into any order in the list, and the order you set is the order the exhibit switcher walks through.
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Reconcile the list against the files, twice
Print the list, open every exhibit, and confirm that the number on the list, the name in the tool and the document on screen are the same thing. Then have a second person repeat it. Errors found here cost minutes; the same errors found at trial cost credibility. A trial exhibit list template gives you the columns to check against.
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Freeze the set and record changes as changes
After the exchange deadline, treat the set as closed. Late additions get a clearly distinguishable number rather than being slotted into the middle, and every change goes on a short log with a date. Exhibit Room's duplicate action is useful here: duplicate the trial before a major revision so the earlier state still exists.
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Take a backup and put it somewhere else
Export the whole trial to a single file and keep a copy off the laptop. In Exhibit Room this is an export to a
.exhibitroomfile containing metadata, PDFs and annotations, which imports onto another computer. Backups are manual, so this only protects you if you actually do it — see trial backup and transfer.
Examples
In the fictional matter of Smith v. Jones, the produced set runs to about four thousand pages. Counsel's element memo cuts it to 180 candidate documents, and a second pass with the witness list brings it to 62 exhibits.
The coordinator makes three decisions and writes them on one page. Emails carry their attachments as a single PDF, so a six-message thread with a two-page attachment becomes one exhibit. Each of the four amendments to the supply agreement gets its own number, because two of them are disputed individually. Photographs of the same location taken on the same day are grouped into one exhibit with one photograph per page, in chronological order.
The files are then named 001 - … through 062 - …, imported in four drag-and-drop batches, and reordered into witness sequence: Reyes first with eleven exhibits, then Okonjo with nine, then the remaining two witnesses. The final reconciliation catches two problems — an exhibit named for the wrong date and a PDF where page 12 is upside down — both of which would have been visible on a courtroom screen.
Related terminology
The master document that everything else reconciles against is the exhibit list. Individual documents in it become trial exhibits once you intend to offer them, each carrying its own exhibit number. Documents drawn from a production usually already carry a Bates number, which stays useful for tracing a document back to the source set even though it is not the identifier the court will use.
Frequently asked questions
Should the exhibit set be organized by witness or by subject?
By witness for the presentation order, by subject in the descriptions so you can still find things thematically. Most teams find that a witness-ordered list with a good description column answers both needs without maintaining two orderings.
What do we do about a document that several witnesses will use?
Give it one number and reference it from each witness's section of the running order. Duplicating a document under two numbers creates a reconciliation problem later and confuses the record.
Can two people work on the same exhibit set at once?
Not in the same copy. Exhibit Room stores the trial on one computer and has no cloud sync or shared editing. Teams usually have one person own the set and distribute a .exhibitroom export when others need a current copy.
How large can a single exhibit be?
Large. Pages are rendered as you scroll to them, so PDFs of several hundred pages open without a wait. Practical limits come from the courtroom, not the file: nobody wants to watch you scroll through a three-hundred-page appendix.
Is there a way to print the exhibit list from the application?
No. Exhibit Room does not print exhibit lists. Keep your list in a spreadsheet or use the trial exhibit list and exhibit numbering sheet templates, which are built to be printed and filled in.
Put your exhibit set in one place
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