Guides
Presenting emails in court as exhibits
Emails are the most common documentary exhibit in modern litigation and the most frequently botched. Three things cause the trouble: the thread, the header block, and the attachments.
A thread is a conversation stored backwards. Most clients print it newest-first, which means a jury reads the reply before the question. Decide whether your exhibit runs in the order the messages were sent or the order the client software shows them, and be consistent across the whole set.
The header block — From, To, Cc, Date, Subject — is the part that makes the message identifiable, and it is the part people accidentally leave out. An attachment is a separate document that the covering message refers to; whether it travels inside the same exhibit or gets its own number is a decision to make once and apply everywhere.
Preparing the file as a PDF
Exhibit Room imports PDFs only, and email lives in a client, so a conversion step is unavoidable. Exporting from the email client itself generally beats taking screenshots, because it preserves the header fields as text and produces a page that is straight and legible.
In Outlook, opening the message and choosing File then Print with a PDF printer gives a page that includes the header block; the "Memo Style" option prints the message body with its headers. In Apple Mail, File then Export as PDF does the same job. Gmail's print icon opens a print view that a PDF printer will capture, and it includes the date, sender and recipients at the top. Whichever route you take, open the result and confirm that the header fields are actually on the page and that long recipient lists have not been truncated with an ellipsis.
Attachments have to be exported separately from their parent message and then either combined into one PDF behind the covering email or given their own exhibit number. Native attachments that are not PDFs — a spreadsheet, a photograph, a word processing document — need their own conversion; the spreadsheet and photograph pages cover the settings worth choosing.
Presenting it in Exhibit Room
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Import the thread as one PDF
Bring the combined file in by drag and drop or the file picker. One exhibit holds one PDF, so if you decided the attachment travels with the message, that decision is already baked into the file you are importing.
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Number it and record the message you care about
Set the exhibit number, then put the page and the sender in the description — for example, "p.2, Okonjo to Reyes, 14 Mar, 09:41". You cannot search inside a PDF in Exhibit Room, so the page number written down in preparation is what gets you there under pressure.
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Mark the sentence, and mark the header if it is disputed
Highlight the line the witness will read. If authorship or timing is in issue, add a second mark on the From or Date field — a rectangle around the header block reads more clearly than a highlight over small gray type.
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Use the redaction overlay only for screen clutter
A black box drawn over a long distribution list or an unrelated signature block keeps the display clean, and that is all it does. It does not remove anything from the file, so anything that genuinely must be removed has to be handled before import.
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Present the page, then move through the thread
Press Present, type the page number and press Enter to land on the message you want. W fits the page width, which suits the narrow column of text an email export usually produces. PageUp and PageDown walk the thread message by message when a witness is asked what came next.
What to highlight and what to avoid
Highlight the operative sentence and the header field that ties it to a person and a moment. In an argument about knowledge, the timestamp is often more important than the text; in an argument about authority, the Cc line can be the whole point. The coverage habits in how to highlight a PDF during trial apply here with extra force, because email text is set small.
Avoid putting an entire thread on the screen and inviting the jury to read whatever catches their eye — quoted text below the reply is where unhelpful material hides. Avoid exhibits that show a preview pane, a folder tree, or the client's interface, which make the document look like a screenshot rather than a record. Avoid silently dropping duplicate messages from a thread; if you have shortened it, say so and be ready to produce the full version. And check the quoted history at the bottom of the last page before you ever display it, because it is the part nobody reads during preparation.
Frequently asked questions
Should an attachment get its own exhibit number?
Either approach is workable as long as it is consistent. Separate numbers are cleaner when the attachment matters independently; keeping them together is easier when the point is that the attachment was sent with that message.
Do I need the full email headers with routing information?
Usually the visible header block is enough. Full internet headers come up when transmission or authorship is genuinely contested, and they are exported differently from the message body — plan for that before trial, not during it.
Can Exhibit Room open .msg or .eml files?
No. Exhibit Room imports PDFs only, so messages must be exported to PDF in the email client first.
How do I show two emails side by side?
You cannot inside presentation mode, which displays one page at a time. Teams that need a direct comparison build a single page containing both messages and offer it as an illustrative exhibit.
Bring a thread in and present one message at a time
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