Use cases
Arbitration: the procedural order decides, not your habits
Arbitration is the setting where the exhibit conventions are written down in advance and are specific to your case. A procedural order, or the tribunal's directions at the first conference, will usually say how documents are numbered, when bundles are exchanged, whether there is a joint bundle, and in what form the hearing copies are provided. None of it is optional and none of it is necessarily what you are used to.
The hearing room is also different. Often it is a conference room in a hotel or an institution rather than a courtroom, with three arbitrators, counsel on both sides, and a screen whose provenance nobody is sure of. There is frequently no clerk and no court technician, so whoever brought the laptop is the technician.
Building to the tribunal's scheme
Read the procedural order and take the numbering from it literally. Claimant exhibits as C-1, C-2 and respondent exhibits as R-1, R-2 is the most common pattern, often with separate series for legal authorities and witness statements. Some tribunals direct a consolidated bundle with continuous pagination across the whole set instead.
Exhibit Room's exhibit number is a free text field precisely so schemes like this work: type C-14 or CLA-3 and that is what appears beside the document and on the screen during the hearing. Mirror the tribunal's order in your list order as well, so that when the chair says "turn to C-14" you are already looking at the right neighborhood. Organizing trial exhibits covers the underlying discipline, and it applies unchanged here.
Workflow in Exhibit Room
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Create a trial for the arbitration
Use the case reference and the institution in the case name and number fields, and name the parties as the tribunal does.
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Type the tribunal's numbering exactly
C-1, R-7, CLA-12 or continuous pagination: whatever the procedural order says, entered as the exhibit number rather than translated into your firm's convention.
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Import the bundle document by document
One PDF per exhibit. If you received one enormous merged bundle, split it before importing so each exhibit can be reached on its own.
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Mark the passages for each witness
Arbitration cross-examination tends to run on a small number of contested passages. Highlight them, and note the paragraph reference in each exhibit's description.
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Carry the whole set on two machines
Export the trial to an .exhibitroom file and import it on a second laptop. Hearing rooms abroad are an awkward place to find a replacement.
The hearing room on the day
Arrive early enough to plug in and test, because the room is usually shared and the display arrangement is whatever the last group left. Find out whether the tribunal is reading from screens, from paper bundles, or from their own laptops with the electronic bundle loaded, and match what you display to what they are holding.
Expect to work offline. Hotel and institution networks are unreliable and often unsuitable for client material anyway, and Exhibit Room keeps everything on the machine, so nothing you need depends on getting a wireless connection in a basement meeting room. If the hearing is partly remote, which many are, see remote hearing exhibits.
Arbitration questions
Can I use C-1 and R-1 style numbering?
Yes. The exhibit number accepts any text you type, so institutional and party-prefixed schemes work without a workaround.
We were sent one merged PDF bundle. Now what?
Split it into per-exhibit PDFs before importing, using whatever PDF tool you have. Each Exhibit Room exhibit holds a single file.
Can I show a hyperlinked electronic bundle the way the tribunal has it?
Exhibit Room presents one document at a time and moves between exhibits with the switcher rather than following links inside a bundle.
Is the set safe to carry across borders?
The data sits on your machine, so it travels with the device and nothing else. Treat the laptop the way your client's confidentiality obligations require, including disk encryption.
Carry the whole bundle on one laptop
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