Setting up a laptop to present exhibits in court

Call the courtroom deputy or clerk before you plan anything. Which connector does the evidence display take, is there a monitor the jury sees, is there a switch box or a document camera, who is allowed to plug into it, and can you get in for a walkthrough before trial. Write the answers down along with who gave them, because the person setting up on the morning may not be the person who called. Building rules on equipment requests, what may be carried through security and whether the display may be photographed vary by court and by jurisdiction, so ask about those in the same call.

Then buy for the answer, in duplicate. A laptop with only USB-C ports needs a USB-C to HDMI adapter; an older courtroom projector may offer only VGA, which is an analog signal and needs an active adapter rather than a passive plug. Test the exact adapter with the exact laptop you will bring, because a dongle that behaves on the office monitor can fail on a long courthouse cable run.

Carry your own HDMI cable, ten to fifteen feet, since the cable at counsel table is often just short enough to drag the laptop to the edge of the table. Label everything so it comes home with you. If the room uses a switch box, find out who operates it and how long a switch takes: a two-second black screen changes how you phrase the transition to a witness.

Mirroring shows the same picture on the laptop and the courtroom display. Extending makes the second screen a separate desktop that you drag windows onto. For presenting exhibits, mirroring is usually the right choice: what you see is exactly what the room sees, with no possibility of the wrong window being dragged into view.

Extending is what people reach for when they want private notes on the laptop while the room sees only the exhibit. That requires the application to have a presenter view, and Exhibit Room does not have one, so extending gives you a window you must drag rather than a private control screen. Keep notes on paper or on a second device instead.

Switch display modes with the Windows key and P on Windows, or the Displays pane in System Settings on macOS. Watch the resolution when you mirror: the two screens settle on a shared resolution, and a page that was comfortable on the laptop can become small or soft on the projector. Check the result on the actual courtroom display rather than in the office.

Every notification is a small disclosure to the jury. Before trial, turn on do not disturb or focus mode and save the profile. Then quit mail and chat applications rather than muting them, sign out of anything with a calendar alert, and close the browser entirely.

Disable automatic updates and automatic restarts for the trial period. An operating system that decides to install an update overnight and reboot into a setup screen at 8:50 has ended more than one carefully prepared morning. Set the screen saver off, choose a plain desktop background, and clear the desktop of file names that should not be read across a courtroom.

Close every application you are not presenting from. A clean machine with one window open is faster to recover when something does go wrong, and there is nothing to accidentally reveal. How to present exhibits in court covers the presenting routine itself.

Plug in and stay plugged in. Set the machine never to sleep and the screen never to turn off while on mains power, and set the lid-close action to do nothing if you plan to close the lid while connected. Then charge to full anyway, because the outlet at counsel table may be shared, awkward or occupied.

Bring an extension lead and a small power strip. Courthouse tables rarely have an outlet where you want one, and taping a cable across a walkway is a conversation you do not want to have with the bailiff.

Think about where the laptop physically sits. You need to reach the keyboard while standing at the lectern in some courtrooms and while seated in others. A wireless keyboard can help, as long as you have tested the range and brought spare batteries.

Readability is decided by the furthest seat, not by your screen. Take the laptop into a room the size of the courtroom, put an exhibit up, and walk to the back. Body text in a ten point letter is comfortable at two feet and invisible at twenty.

For text documents, fit width is generally more readable than fit page, since it fills the display with the column of text rather than showing a whole page of margins. For a dense table such as a payment ledger, plan to zoom into the rows you are asking about rather than showing the whole sheet and hoping. Knowing in advance which page and which passage you need is most of the work; how to highlight a PDF during trial covers preparing those emphases ahead of time.

Older projectors wash out yellow. If a highlight disappears on the courtroom display, a rectangle or an arrow around the passage survives the projection better. Check the background color too: a dark presentation background can be easier on the eyes in a dim room, while a bright room usually wants the light one.

Run the opening of your first examination end to end, on the courtroom hardware if you can get a walkthrough slot, and otherwise on the same laptop and adapter at your desk. Use only the keyboard, because reaching for a trackpad while a witness waits is the moment most people lose the thread.

Practice three recoveries: the wrong exhibit is on screen, the display goes black, and a page will not advance. Knowing that you can leave the fullscreen view, pick a different exhibit and return in a few seconds turns a crisis into a pause.

Finally, rehearse with a backup in the bag. Exhibits on a second laptop, plus plain PDFs on a USB drive, plus printed copies of the documents you cannot do without. Technology fails sometimes; a trial does not stop for it.