Running a multi-day trial out of one laptop

Import. Select a batch of PDFs in the file picker, or drag a handful onto the window, and each becomes an exhibit with a number, a name, a description and a status. Several can arrive together, which matters when a late production lands overnight.

Prepare. Open an exhibit and read it the way you will read it aloud. Highlight the sentence, box the line item, put an arrow beside the date that does not match. Annotations sit apart from the document, so the PDF is never rewritten.

Present. One press fills the screen with the page. Arrow and page keys move through pages, E opens the exhibit switcher, and Esc returns you to the manager.

Create the trial first. Case name is the only required field; case number, court and parties are optional and worth adding, because in a month you will have several trials on one machine.

Numbering defaults to 001, 002 and upward, or use whatever the case calls for, including A, B, A-1 or P-12. Write the name the way you think of the document, not the way the scanner saved it, and give each a one-line description. Reorder until the list tracks your outline, and if a document is superseded, replace the PDF on the existing exhibit so the number and every mark stay on one row. How to prepare exhibits for trial covers this stage.

Mark up early. Highlight, pen, rectangle, arrow, text and callout are all there, everything autosaves, and undo and redo behave normally. The visual redaction overlay draws a black box over an area for presentation only: it hides that area on screen, it does not remove the underlying content from the PDF file, and Exhibit Room does not do permanent redaction, so a copy shared with anyone else still carries what sat beneath the box.

Rehearse on the fictional Smith v. Jones demo trial that ships with the app rather than on a client file.

The window sits beside your outline. You work from the outline and reach for the app when a document needs to be on the screen; because the switcher takes a number or part of a name, you rarely scroll the list while standing.

Status is the other half of the day. An exhibit moves from Not offered to Offered, then to Admitted, Rejected or Illustrative as the court rules. You change it from the exhibit's context actions when it happens, not from memory at lunch. Status is always written as text next to the exhibit rather than shown only as a color, so the list reads over a shoulder or to a colleague who has never opened the app. Exhibit status tracking explains that column.

Pages render as you reach them, so a long medical chart opens without a wait, and nothing can be edited while presenting.

The prep machine is often not the machine that goes to the courthouse, and laptops fail at inconvenient moments. A whole trial, with its metadata, its PDFs and every annotation, exports as one .exhibitroom file you can copy to a drive and import elsewhere. The license covers two computers, usually the desk machine and the trial machine.

Backups are manual and stay with you: nothing is sent anywhere, and no server copy exists for someone else to restore. Export after a substantive prep session and again at the end of each trial day. Trial backup and transfer describes the import step.

An exported trial is a snapshot, not a live link. If a colleague imports your file and annotates an exhibit, those marks stay on their laptop. There is no shared workspace and no merge.

Exhibit Room does one job: PDF exhibits, prepared and presented. The boundary is worth more than a feature list.

PDF only. Photographs, emails, contracts, invoices and records all work once they are PDFs, and converting them happens elsewhere. There is no video or audio playback, no transcript handling and no deposition synchronization.

Nothing is in the cloud: no cloud sync, no shared team workspace, no mobile or tablet version, and no dual monitor presenter view. Redaction is visual only, and permanent redaction, PDF text search, optical character recognition and Bates stamping sit outside the app.