Tracking exhibit status during trial

Exhibit status is a single-owner job. When two people share it, both assume the other captured the ruling made during a heated exchange, and that is precisely the ruling you will need at closing.

The keeper is usually the paralegal or the second chair, sitting where they can hear the bench clearly. They need a printed exhibit list, the tracker, a pen and the laptop, and they need permission to be doing nothing else during an offer. Someone taking notes on testimony cannot reliably capture rulings at the same time.

Name the person before the first morning and name a substitute for the moments the keeper steps out. Write both names on the sheet.

A line per offer is the format that survives contact with a real trial. An exhibit refused at eleven and received at noon produces two lines, and the pair tells you both what the problem was and what fixed it. A single line per exhibit forces someone to overwrite the first answer and loses the reason.

Capture five things in the moment: the exhibit number, who offered it, the witness on the stand, the clock time and the ruling. Then the transcript reference while the reporter's page is still current, and finally a short note during the next question.

Do not editorialize. Sustained, foundation is a record. Judge unhappy is not. The sheet will be read by a colleague who was not in the room, possibly weeks later.

Rulings are not binary in practice. An exhibit can be received outright, received for a limited purpose, received subject to a later connection, refused, or held over while the judge reads something. Each of those has different consequences for how you can use the document, so record the words rather than a tick.

When the court limits the purpose, write the limit out in full on the line. Received for notice and received for the truth of its contents are two different exhibits as far as your closing is concerned, and the distinction is easy to lose overnight.

When a ruling is deferred, keep the exhibit out of your admitted column and put it on a short list of open items that gets read at the start of the next day. Deferred rulings are the single most commonly lost item in a busy trial, because nobody is assigned to carry them. The vocabulary is set out in marked exhibit and admitted exhibit.

The court's record governs. In most courtrooms the clerk maintains the official exhibit log, and your sheet is a working copy that must agree with it. Introduce yourself to the courtroom deputy on day one and ask how and when they prefer to be asked about the log, then keep to it.

Reconcile at the end of each day rather than at the end of the trial. A difference found the same afternoon is usually a clerical slip that can be resolved from memory and the transcript. The same difference found on day six is an argument.

When the two records disagree, treat the court's as correct and find out why yours differs. Sometimes the answer is that an exhibit was received during a passage your keeper missed; sometimes it is that an offer was withdrawn and not recorded. Both are worth knowing. Practice on how exhibits are logged and when they are treated as received varies by court and jurisdiction, so ask rather than carrying over the last trial's assumptions.

Twenty minutes at the end of each day covers it. Update the status of every exhibit that moved, on the sheet and in whatever software you are presenting from, so the two agree before anyone leaves.

Pull tomorrow's exhibits into the order you will use them and open each one to confirm it displays. Check the open-items list: deferred rulings, exhibits to re-offer, documents promised to the court or to opposing counsel.

Then export a backup of the trial to a second drive. The statuses, the PDFs and the annotations go into a single file, so the state of the set as it stood at the end of the day is preserved and can be opened on the spare laptop. Trial backup and transfer explains the mechanics.

Exhibit Room carries a status on each exhibit: Not offered, Offered, Admitted, Rejected or Illustrative. The value is shown as text beside the exhibit rather than as a color alone, which means a colleague can read the state of the whole set without asking what a shade of green means. Changing it takes a couple of seconds from the context menu.

Change statuses during a break, not while a witness is answering. The sheet is the live record; the app is where the team reads the set later. Exhibit status tracking covers the behavior.

Two limits are worth stating plainly. There is no status for a reserved ruling, so deferred items live on your open-items list. And the app produces no printed admission report, so the tracker remains the document you print, hand around and read from in closing.