One exhibit set for hearings, depositions and everything in between

Import. A proceeding begins as a trial record named for the matter, with room for the case number, court and parties. Exhibits are PDFs, one document each, added through the file picker or by dragging several onto the window; anything not already a PDF has to be converted first.

Prepare. Give each exhibit a number, a name and a description that still makes sense in six weeks, then order them to follow your argument or examination. Annotate with highlight, pen, rectangle, arrow, text and callout, all movable and removable afterward, saved as you work and kept apart from the PDF so the document is never altered.

Present. Press Present and the screen clears to a single page carrying an exhibit number, a name and a page counter, each of which can be switched off in Settings. Arrow keys turn pages, W fits the width, E opens the switcher, Esc ends it.

A motion hearing is short and narrow: four documents, ten minutes, and what matters is reaching the second paragraph of the third without a pause. Rehearse the jumps, not the speech. Hearing exhibits goes further.

A deposition is long and unpredictable, and the planned order rarely survives the first hour, so the switcher matters more than the sequence. Exhibit Room does not connect to a transcript or a reporter's system, so formal marking stays wherever the parties agreed. See deposition exhibits.

A mediation session is a negotiation with documents in it: one clause, one invoice, one photograph, shown to people who are often not lawyers. Fewer exhibits, more thought about the single page. See mediation exhibits.

An arbitration hearing sits between a bench trial and a long meeting, and panels often set exhibit conventions in a procedural order that the number field can simply follow. See arbitration exhibits.

Remote appearances work through screen sharing. Exhibit Room opens a clean fullscreen page on your own screen, and you share that screen through whichever video conferencing application the court or the parties are using. It does not join the call and has nothing to configure.

That sets the boundaries. There is no remote control, so nobody on the other end can drive your exhibits; there is no mobile or tablet version and no iPad app, so the presenting machine is the laptop in front of you. Sharing a whole display or a single window is a choice inside the conferencing application.

Fullscreen is what makes a shared screen readable, since it removes the menus and window edges that eat half the frame on a participant's laptop. There is no separate presenter display, so what you see is what the room sees. Remote hearing exhibits walks through a dry run.

Everything you put into Exhibit Room stays on your computer. PDFs, annotations and trial data are written to local storage and nothing is uploaded, because there is no account and no synchronized copy anywhere else.

The application works offline. A connection is needed once to activate a license and occasionally so it can be re-checked, and the application never locks in the middle of your work because it is offline, so hostile courthouse wifi is a non-event.

One consequence is worth saying out loud: if the only copy of a set is on one laptop, that laptop is a single point of failure, so keep your PDFs where the firm normally keeps case documents. The privacy page states what does and does not leave your machine.

Small rooms are unforgiving: with four people around a table, everyone sees your desktop, your folder names and the notification that arrives at the wrong moment. Presentation mode shows the page and nothing else and refuses edits, so a stray keystroke cannot drag an annotation while an arbitrator is reading.

Annotations made during preparation appear in presentation, so decide beforehand whether the markup on a page is something the other side should read.

Where a page holds an account number or an unrelated client's name, the visual redaction overlay covers that area during presentation. Its limits matter: the overlay is a black box drawn over the page for presentation only, it does not remove the underlying content from the PDF file, and Exhibit Room does not do permanent redaction. For anything produced, filed or emailed, use a proper redaction process, and read visual redaction first.