Use cases
For teams: decide who owns the set
Three or four people touch a trial set: an associate who knows the documents, a paralegal who assembles them, a partner who will argue from them, and sometimes a trial technician hired for the week. Each of them wants the current version, and the version they each have is usually not the same one.
This is the part where Exhibit Room's design has a direct consequence you need to plan for. It is local-first and there is no cloud sync, no shared workspace and no merge. A trial lives on a machine, and it reaches another machine as an exported file that someone carried there. Rather than working around that, most teams find it easier to adopt the rule the design implies: one authoritative set, one owner, everything else a copy.
Choosing the owner and the rhythm
Pick a single person whose machine holds the real set for a given phase, usually the paralegal or associate doing the assembly. Everyone else reviews copies and sends changes back as instructions, not as edited files. The instruction is cheap to apply; reconciling two annotated versions is not.
Then fix a rhythm for distribution. A daily export during trial preparation, dated, put wherever your firm keeps matter files, is enough for most teams. Announce when a new version lands so nobody spends an evening annotating a superseded set. At the handover to trial, ownership moves once, deliberately: the trial laptop becomes authoritative and the office copy stops being edited.
Workflow in Exhibit Room
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Name the owner and write it down
In the matter's task list or kickoff note, name the person and the machine holding the authoritative trial for this phase.
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Agree the numbering and naming rules up front
Scheme, name format, and what goes in the description. Consistency matters more than which convention you pick.
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Owner builds, others review copies
Distribute an exported .exhibitroom file. Reviewers open it, note what should change, and send the notes back rather than editing and returning a file.
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Apply changes in one place
The owner makes every edit to the authoritative set, then exports again with a new dated file name. There is never a merge step.
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Hand over before trial, not during
Import onto the trial laptop, present a few exhibits from it, then declare that machine authoritative. Do this a day early.
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Keep one machine as the live backup
A second laptop with the same import, updated each evening, so a hardware failure costs an hour rather than a day.
What Exhibit Room does not do for teams
Being explicit is more useful than a list of aspirations. There is no shared cloud workspace and no real-time collaboration; two people cannot annotate one set at once. There is no permissions model, no comment thread and no version history beyond the exported files you keep yourself, which is the direct consequence of keeping everything local. There are no mobile or tablet apps, so nobody is reviewing the set on an iPad in the car.
On licensing, a license is $149 one time and covers two computers, which usually means one person's desktop and laptop. A team of four working in parallel needs four licenses; what that costs is on the pricing page. If those constraints are the wrong shape for how your team works, that is worth knowing before a trial rather than during one, and choosing trial presentation software sets out the questions to ask.
Team questions
Can two people edit the same trial at once?
No. There is no sync and no merge. One machine holds the authoritative set and changes are made there.
How do reviewers give feedback?
As notes against exhibit numbers, not as edited copies. The owner applies them, which keeps a single history of what changed.
How many licenses does a team of four need?
Four, since each license covers two computers belonging to one person. Trial technicians brought in for a week need their own as well.
Can a colleague see my set without installing anything?
No. Opening a trial requires the app. For a quick review, send the underlying PDFs; annotations live in Exhibit Room, not in those files.
What is the single most useful team habit?
A dated export at the end of every working day, in one agreed location, announced to everyone. It resolves most version arguments before they start.
Work out what your team actually needs
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