Guides
Presenting medical records in court as exhibits
Medical records are defined by three characteristics: there are a great many of them, only a handful of pages matter, and almost every page contains information about a person that does not belong on a public screen.
Volume shapes everything. A single provider's file can run to several hundred pages of intake forms, nursing notes, billing codes and duplicated faxes, and a case with four providers can reach several thousand. The pages that carry the testimony — an admission note, an operative report, a discharge summary, one physical therapy assessment — are typically a fraction of one percent of the set.
That means precision about page ranges is the whole skill. And because these documents carry dates of birth, identification numbers, addresses and details of unrelated conditions, sensitivity has to be handled during preparation, not improvised at the lectern.
Preparing the file as a PDF
Exhibit Room imports PDFs only, which is usually convenient here because providers and record retrieval services generally deliver PDFs already. The work is in what you do to those PDFs before they become exhibits.
Records arriving on paper or on a disc as images should be scanned or checked at 300 dpi in grayscale; handwritten notes and faxed pages are the pages that fail at lower settings, and they are often the pages you need. Keep the provider's own pagination or the Bates numbering visible, because that is how you will cite a page to the court and to a testifying expert.
For volume, the common approach is one exhibit per provider or per episode of care, with an agreed page range cited for each passage you will use; the grouping decisions are the same ones described in how to organize trial exhibits. Where the full set is too large to be useful as an exhibit, teams prepare an excerpt — the operative pages only, in order, with the original page numbers still visible — and offer it alongside or instead of the complete file, subject to what the court and the other side accept. Anything that genuinely has to be removed before production must be removed with a dedicated redaction tool before import; see how to redact a PDF for what that involves and how to verify it.
Presenting it in Exhibit Room
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Import the set and name it by provider and date range
Import each provider's file as its own exhibit and name it accordingly — "Riverside Orthopedic, Mar–Sep". Large PDFs are fine: pages are rendered as you reach them, so a document of several hundred pages opens immediately rather than making you wait.
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Record your page ranges in the description, with a cross-reference
Put the pages you will use in the exhibit description: "pp. 112–118 operative report; p. 203 discharge summary". Note both the PDF page number and the provider's own page or Bates number, because the two rarely match and the expert will cite the second one.
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Mark only the finding you will ask about
Highlight the sentence in the note, or bracket the value in a results table with a rectangle. A callout is useful for translating a term or an abbreviation into the words the witness used, but keep the annotation off the surrounding entries about unrelated care.
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Use the visual redaction overlay to keep sensitive detail off the display
Draw the redaction overlay over an identification number, an address, or an unrelated diagnosis that has no place on a courtroom screen. This covers it in the viewer and in presentation, and the visual redaction page says plainly what it is. It does not remove anything from the PDF file, so never treat it as the way you produce or file a sanitized record.
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Present by page number and use thumbnails between visits
Press Present, type
112and press Enter to land on the operative report without scrolling past two hundred pages of anything else. PageUp and PageDown move through a multi-page note. Esc returns to the exhibit view, where the thumbnails panel makes finding the next passage quick. -
Keep the records on the machine they came to
Case documents, annotations and trial data stay on your computer in Exhibit Room; nothing is uploaded and the application works offline. For a records set that is a meaningful property, and the privacy page sets out exactly what does and does not leave the machine.
What to highlight and what to avoid
Highlight the clinical finding, the date of the entry, and the name of the person who made it. Those three together are what let a witness say what happened, when, and on whose observation. Where a value is being compared across visits, mark the same field on each page so the comparison is visually obvious.
Avoid displaying a page carrying an unrelated condition, a family history section, or another patient's information that has crept into the file — the last one happens more often than it should, and it is worth a dedicated check during preparation. Avoid scrolling live through a large record in front of a jury, which broadcasts far more than you intended; jump by page number instead. Avoid presenting handwritten notes without having decided what they say, because a dispute about legibility in front of the court rarely goes well. And avoid treating a drawn box as protection for anything that leaves your office.
Frequently asked questions
Can I search a records set for a term like "MRI"?
Not in Exhibit Room, which has no PDF text search and no OCR. Locating passages is preparation work: build a page index while you review, and store the page numbers in the exhibit description.
Should the whole record go in as one exhibit or should we excerpt?
Both approaches are in common use and the answer usually depends on the court and the other side's position. Excerpts are far easier to present; completeness objections are the reason many teams offer the full set and cite ranges from it.
Do the records leave my computer when I use Exhibit Room?
No. PDFs, annotations and trial data are stored only on your computer and the application does not upload them. It works offline, and a license activation check is the only thing that needs an internet connection.
How do I share a records exhibit with co-counsel?
Export the trial to a single .exhibitroom file and transfer it as you would any other sensitive material, under whatever protective order applies. There is no cloud sync, so transfers are deliberate acts rather than background ones.
What about duplicate pages in a provider's file?
Leave them in the exhibit if you are offering the record as produced, and note the duplication on your index so nobody wastes time deciding whether two pages are different. Removing pages from a produced record is a decision to take with counsel, not a tidying exercise.
Work through a large records set without the wait
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