Guides
How to prepare exhibits for trial: a working runway
Exhibit preparation fails on timing far more often than on technique. Every individual task is easy; doing all of them in the last forty-eight hours, alongside witness preparation and a motion in limine, is not.
This guide lays out a runway rather than a set of tips. It is aimed at the person who owns the exhibit set — usually a paralegal or trial-support lead — and it assumes a trial about four weeks away. What you will have at the end is a sequence with checkpoints, a hardware rehearsal that happens early enough to fix things, and a backup arrangement that survives a laptop dying on a Sunday night.
Before you start
Put four things on one page: the trial date, the exhibit exchange deadline, the names of everyone who will touch the exhibit set, and the specification of the laptop that will be plugged in at court. The last one is the item teams forget, and it decides which problems you can still fix cheaply.
Collect the source material in whatever form it exists — produced PDFs, native spreadsheets, photographs from a phone, records delivered on a disc. Sort it into "already a usable PDF" and "needs conversion," because the second pile always takes longer than anyone estimates.
Settle naming and numbering now, not later. A zero-padded number, a short description and a date in every file name, and a numbering scheme agreed with the other side, remove a whole class of last-week problems. Both topics have their own pages: organizing trial exhibits and numbering trial exhibits.
Step by step
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Week four: agree the set and the deadlines
Get counsel to sign off on the candidate list and confirm the exchange deadline against the pre-trial order. Circulate the numbering plan to the other side in writing. Nothing technical happens this week, and that is the point — every later step depends on the list not moving.
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Week four: convert everything into PDFs you are happy with
Anything not already a PDF becomes one now: print to PDF from native applications, export from the email client, scan paper at 300 dpi, set print areas and landscape orientation for spreadsheets. Exhibit Room imports PDFs only, so this pile has to be cleared before anything else can proceed. The document type guides cover the formats that need thought.
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Week three: build the trial and import the set
Create the matter, enter the case name and, if you have them, the case number, court and parties. Import the PDFs — drag a batch onto the list or use the file picker — then number, name and describe each exhibit. Put the set in the order you expect to use it. Exhibit Room includes a fictional demo trial, Smith v. Jones, which is a safe place to practise the import and reordering before you touch the real one.
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Week three: read every exhibit end to end
Open each document and scroll it completely. You are hunting for rotated pages, missing pages, illegible scans, and documents that turn out to be the wrong version. Thumbnails make this fast for long documents. Every problem found this week is repairable; the same problem found in week one is a phone call to opposing counsel.
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Week two: prepare the markup
Work through the examination outlines and add the highlights, arrows, rectangles and callouts each witness needs. Keep it sparse and write down the page number of every marked passage. Guidance on tool choice is on annotating exhibits; keep the redaction overlay for presentation only, never for sanitizing a document.
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Week two: rehearse on the actual hardware
Plug the trial laptop into an external display, at the resolution you expect, and run a full witness examination from the exhibit set. Check that text is legible from across a room and that annotations survive the projector. Practise the keys you will use: arrows and PageUp/PageDown for pages, digits then Enter to jump to a page, E for the exhibit switcher, Esc to exit.
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Week one: lock the set and produce the paper
Freeze the exhibit list, print the binders or courtesy copies the court expects, and confirm the delivery method and deadline for any electronic copies chambers requires. Late additions get their own numbers at the end of the sequence rather than being inserted. Use the trial preparation checklist as the sign-off.
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Week one: set up the backups and the second machine
Export the trial to a single
.exhibitroomfile containing metadata, PDFs and annotations, and put copies on two separate drives kept in different bags. Import it onto a second laptop and open two exhibits to prove the transfer worked. An Exhibit Room license covers two computers, which is what makes a genuine spare machine practical rather than theoretical. -
The day before: a quiet, boring final pass
Charge everything, pack the adapters on your courtroom technology checklist, confirm the application opens and the trial loads, and check the presentation settings — background, whether the exhibit number and page counter are shown. Do not install updates the night before; Exhibit Room only updates when you choose, so leave it alone.
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Every trial evening: reconcile and re-export
Update each exhibit's status against the day's rulings, note anything received for a limited purpose, and take a fresh export. Ten minutes of housekeeping keeps the record straight and means a lost laptop costs you a day's annotations at worst.
Examples
In the fictional matter of Smith v. Jones, the trial is set for a Monday four weeks out and the exhibit set will run to about 120 documents.
Week four: counsel signs off on 134 candidates, which the exchange negotiation trims to 120, and the parties agree P- and D- prefixes with a joint J- block. Thirty-one items need conversion — nineteen photographs, a cost tracker spreadsheet, eight emails with attachments, and a 340-page records set delivered on a disc.
Week three: everything is imported in five batches, numbered, described and reordered into witness sequence. The end-to-end read finds four problems, including a spreadsheet exported in portrait that cuts off two columns and an email printed without its header block. Both are re-exported properly.
Week two: 46 annotations are added across 29 exhibits, and a full dry run on the trial laptop and a borrowed projector shows that a thin arrow on a gray scan is invisible from six metres. Eleven arrows get redrawn thicker. Week one: the set is frozen, two .exhibitroom exports go onto separate drives, and the spare laptop is proven by opening P-9.4 and D-17 on it. Nothing dramatic happens on the Monday, which is the entire objective.
Related terminology
What you are building is an exhibit list of trial exhibits, each identified by its exhibit number. During the trial, individual documents move from marked to admitted — or not — and keeping that distinction current in your own records is part of the evening routine above.
Frequently asked questions
Four weeks seems generous. What does a one-week version look like?
Compress in this order: conversion and the end-to-end read first, hardware rehearsal second, markup last. Unmarked exhibits that display correctly beat beautifully annotated exhibits that turn out to be rotated.
How do we keep a second lawyer's copy up to date?
Re-export and re-import. There is no cloud sync or shared editing, so a current copy means a fresh .exhibitroom file. Decide who owns the master set and make everyone else's copy read-only by convention.
What should we test on the courtroom hardware specifically?
Whether your adapter fits, what resolution the display negotiates, how washed out colors look, and whether the room's lighting makes a dark background better than a light one. Exhibit Room lets you set either background for presentation.
Can we start preparing during the free trial?
Yes. The trial runs 14 days with every feature, no watermark and no credit card, starting when the app is first opened. If the case outlasts it, the pricing page has the details of the one-time license.
Does the application need internet access at the courthouse?
No. Case documents stay on the computer and the application works offline; an internet connection is needed once to activate a license and occasionally to re-check it, and it will not lock in the middle of work because a courtroom has no signal.
Start the runway with a 14-day trial
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