Use cases
Exhibits at trial: many documents, one screen, no second takes
A trial is the setting where the exhibit set is at its largest and the tolerance for fumbling is at its lowest. You may carry two hundred documents for eight days of testimony, use sixty of them, and have the order rearranged twice by a witness's availability. Rulings land between questions. Jurors are watching you handle your own case.
What changes at trial, compared with any other appearance, is the audience and the stakes of the pause. A judge alone will wait while you find page 60. Fourteen people in a jury box interpret the wait. The work, then, is front-loaded: an exhibit set that can be driven with your eyes on the witness, and a record of what came in that survives day three.
Preparing a set that is too big to remember
Freeze your numbering before anything else, because a renumber after the pretrial exchange is painful and visible. Then build the trial in Exhibit Room with the case name, number, court and parties, so the set identifies itself to anyone who opens the laptop.
Name exhibits the way you will think of them at the podium: "Lease, 14 Mar 2023" beats "P-0042". Put the pages you expect to use in each exhibit's description, along with the witness who authenticates it. On a set this size, that description field does more work than any other part of preparation, because it is the only place your own reasoning is stored next to the document.
Workflow in Exhibit Room
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Create the trial and lock the numbering
Enter the case details, then decide whether the set runs 001, 002 or P-1, D-1 or A, B, C. Every later step assumes this is settled.
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Import in witness order
Drag in the PDFs, several at a time, then reorder so the list reads in the sequence your witnesses will produce them. Scrolling in the right direction is worth real seconds.
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Annotate only what you will actually show
Mark the clause, the figure, the signature. An unmarked exhibit is faster to prepare and slower to use; a fully marked one is the opposite. Sixty exhibits, not two hundred.
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Rehearse one witness end to end
Present from the trial laptop, jump with E, and check that every exhibit opens on the page you expect. This is where a missing page turns up.
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Update status as rulings land
Move each exhibit to Offered, then Admitted or Rejected, from the exhibit list. Doing it in the moment is the only version of this habit that works.
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Export at the end of each trial day
One file, dated, onto a drive that is not the laptop. Day four's annotations are as hard to recreate as day one's.
What to bring into the courtroom
The laptop with the set already imported and opened once. The cable and adapter for the courtroom's input, plus a spare of each, because the adapter is the single most common failure. A paper exhibit list, since Exhibit Room does not print one; build it from the trial exhibit list template.
Bring a second machine if you can, with the same trial imported from your latest backup file. It costs you ten minutes and buys you the ability to keep going after a hardware failure at 10am. And bring paper copies of the handful of exhibits the judge or the witness will want in hand.
Where trials go wrong on day three
Three failures repeat. The set drifts: someone adds an exhibit under a number already used in the pretrial exchange, and two lists stop matching. The record drifts: nobody has updated status since Tuesday, and the answer to "is that one in?" becomes a guess. And attention drifts: by the third day the person running the screen is tired, which is exactly when a mouse-driven workflow starts costing pauses.
All three are preparation problems, not courtroom problems. A frozen numbering scheme, status updated in the moment, and keyboard navigation learned before opening statements handle most of it.
Trial questions
How many exhibits can I keep in one trial?
Work in one trial per matter rather than splitting by witness. Pages render on demand, so long documents with hundreds of pages are handled without loading the whole file up front.
Should the lawyer or someone else drive the screen?
Either works. The fullscreen view cannot be edited, so handing the keyboard to a colleague carries no risk of altering the set mid-examination.
Can I add an exhibit during trial?
Yes, if the court permits it. Import the PDF, number it consistently with the existing set, and note in its description when and how it came in.
What if the courtroom has no display for the jury?
Then you are back to paper for publication and using the screen for the bench and counsel. Confirm the courtroom's setup before trial week, not during it.
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