Guides
How to present a PDF in court from your laptop
You have a PDF — a lease, a permit, a scanned letter — and a hearing where it needs to appear on a screen in front of the judge, the witness and opposing counsel. This guide is written for the lawyer or paralegal who will be driving the laptop, not for a hired technician.
By the end you will have a file that opens without fuss, a way to reach any page in about two seconds, and a display routine you can run while your attention is on the question you are asking. Everything below is tool-agnostic first; the last sentences of each step show how it maps onto Exhibit Room.
Before you start
Collect four things. The final PDF, not the draft you were emailing around last week. The page count, because you will be quoting page numbers out loud. The video cable and whatever adapter your laptop needs for it. And a clear answer to the question "what will the judge actually be looking at" — a wall-mounted monitor, a projector, a witness screen, or a document camera you are bypassing.
On file format: a PDF that was produced digitally (exported from Word, printed to PDF, downloaded from a records portal) will stay sharp at any zoom level. A PDF that is really a photograph of paper will not, so scan at 300 dpi and straighten pages before the hearing rather than during it. There is more on that in scanning and PDF quality for exhibits.
Name the file so that a stranger could find it in a hurry. 014 - Ground Lease - 2019-04-11.pdf tells you the exhibit number, what the document is, and its date. scan0042.pdf tells you nothing at 9:15 on a trial morning.
Step by step
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Confirm what the courtroom will display
Ask the clerk, in advance, which input the courtroom screens use and whether counsel tables have their own feed. Some rooms hand you an HDMI cable at the podium; others expect VGA, and a few have nothing at all and expect paper. Write the answer down and pack the adapter that matches it. The courtroom laptop setup notes cover the cabling and display settings worth checking the day before.
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Get the document onto the machine you will use
Whatever software you present from, the PDF should live on the local disk of the laptop that will be plugged in — not on a shared drive, not in a browser tab, not on a phone. Courtroom wifi is unreliable and guest networks often block the services you rely on. Exhibit Room stores your PDFs and annotations on the computer itself and runs entirely offline, so a dead network changes nothing about your hearing.
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Open it once, in full, before the hearing
Scroll the whole document from first page to last. You are looking for pages that rendered upside down, a signature block that got cut off at the margin, and any page that takes a long time to draw. Fix problems by producing a better PDF, not by apologizing for them on the record. Exhibit Room renders pages as you reach them, so documents with several hundred pages open immediately rather than making you wait.
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Hide everything that is not the document
Judges and jurors should see the page, not your file tree, your email badge, or the name of the folder the document sits in. Close other applications, silence notifications, and use a fullscreen view rather than a window with toolbars around it. In Exhibit Room this is the Present button, which opens a fullscreen view showing only the page, the exhibit number and name, and the page counter — and each of those three can be switched off in Settings.
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Learn the two or three keys you will actually use
Reaching for a mouse in front of a jury is slow and it shows. Pick a handful of keys and rehearse them until they are automatic. Exhibit Room's presentation mode uses the arrow keys and PageUp/PageDown for pages, Home and End for the first and last page, and Esc to come back out. Typing digits and pressing Enter jumps straight to that page number, which is the one you will use most.
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Set a zoom habit for small print
Deed language, fine print and footnotes are unreadable at whole-page zoom on a screen across the room. Decide in advance whether you will show the full page for context and then zoom, or go straight to the enlarged passage. Exhibit Room's presentation mode has + and − for zoom, F to fit the page and W to fit the width; fit-width is usually the right default for a portrait text document.
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Rehearse the three moments that go wrong
The moments are: the screen going blank when you plug in, finding the page you want while everyone waits, and being asked for a different document than the one you planned on. Run each of them once, out loud, the evening before. Practicing on the same laptop and the same cable you will use is the point.
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Present, then get out cleanly
When the passage has been read into the record, return the screen to something neutral rather than leaving an unrelated page up while the next question is asked. In Exhibit Room, Esc leaves presentation mode and returns you to the exhibit you were on, with your annotations intact and nothing edited by accident. You can read more about how that view behaves on the presentation mode page.
Examples
In the fictional matter of Smith v. Jones, counsel needs one document at a preliminary injunction hearing: a 48-page ground lease, marked Exhibit 014. The operative language is the assignment clause on page 31, and there is a handwritten initial on page 47 that the other side disputes.
The preparation is small. The lease is exported to PDF from the original word processing file so the text stays crisp; the file is named 014 - Ground Lease - 2019-04-11.pdf; page 31 and page 47 are written on a sticky note taped to the laptop. At the hearing, counsel presses Present, types 31, presses Enter, and the assignment clause is on the screen before the sentence introducing it is finished. When the court asks about the initialing, 47 and Enter does the same thing. Total software knowledge required: one button and two keys.
Related terminology
A document only becomes an exhibit when it is offered and marked in a proceeding; before that it is just a PDF in your folder. The identifier the court and the reporter will use is the exhibit number, and a document that has been received into evidence is an admitted exhibit. If the PDF came out of a production it may also carry a Bates number printed in the corner, which is a different thing from its exhibit number and worth keeping straight when you speak.
Frequently asked questions
Should I bring paper copies as well?
Most experienced trial lawyers do, at least for the judge, the witness and the court reporter. Paper is the fallback when a cable fails, and some courts expect a hard copy regardless of what is on the screen. Treat the laptop as the way you show the document and paper as the way you hand it over.
What if the PDF is a scan and the text is blurry on screen?
Rescan it at 300 dpi in grayscale if you still have access to the paper, or ask the producing party for a better copy. Zooming into a low-resolution scan enlarges the blur. Exhibit Room does not run OCR or clean up scans, so the quality of the file you import is the quality you will show.
Can I display two documents side by side?
Not within Exhibit Room's presentation mode, which shows one page of one exhibit at a time. If a side-by-side comparison matters to your argument, the usual approach is to prepare a single PDF that puts the two passages on one page and offer that as an illustrative exhibit.
How do I find a phrase inside a long PDF while I am standing up?
Note the page number during preparation and jump to it by number. Exhibit Room does not have text search inside PDFs, which is exactly why a short cheat sheet of page numbers per document is worth building while you prepare.
Does presenting from a laptop mean my file is uploaded anywhere?
Not with Exhibit Room. Case documents, annotations and trial data stay on your computer, and the application does not upload them. The privacy page sets out what does and does not leave the machine.
Try presenting a PDF the way you would in court
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