Summaries and Illustrative Aids Under Rule 1006

The question that decides what your chart is worth

Almost everything a search expert produces is a chart or a summary. Rankings over time. Sessions by channel. Link acquisition timelines. Keyword overlap tables. Crawl error rollups. Each compresses a body of underlying data far too large to put in front of a jury.

Since 1 December 2024 two rules govern those exhibits, and they have opposite consequences. Rule 1006, as amended, admits a summary, chart, or calculation of voluminous admissible material as evidence, whether or not the underlying material has been introduced. New Rule 107 governs the illustrative aid, which is not evidence and must not be provided to the jury during deliberations unless all parties consent or the court orders otherwise for good cause.

That difference is not a formality. One exhibit is in the room while a jury argues about your case, available to be re-read and relied on in reaching a verdict. The other was on a screen for four minutes during a direct examination and then went away. Both changes were adopted by the Supreme Court on 2 April 2024 and took effect on 1 December 2024, together with amendments to Rules 613, 801(d)(2), and 804(b)(3).

What Rule 1006 now says

The operative text:

(a) Summaries of Voluminous Materials Admissible as Evidence. “The court may admit as evidence a summary, chart, or calculation offered to prove the content of voluminous admissible writings, recordings, or photographs that cannot be conveniently examined in court, whether or not they have been introduced into evidence.”
(b) Procedures. “The proponent must make the underlying originals or duplicates available for examination or copying, or both, by other parties at a reasonable time and place. And the court may order the proponent to produce them in court.”
(c) Illustrative Aids Not Covered. “A summary, chart, or calculation that functions only as an illustrative aid is governed by Rule 107.”

The 2024 amendment settled two points applied inconsistently before it. A Rule 1006 summary is substantive evidence in its own right — not a demonstrative, and a jury should not be told it is “not evidence.” And the underlying materials need not themselves be introduced. That second point is what makes the rule powerful in a data-heavy case: you are not required to move four million log lines into evidence to prove what they contain. Rule 403 still applies, so an inaccurate or argumentative summary remains excludable however well the predicates are met.

What Rule 107 now says

Rule 107 is new, and codifies what was previously managed case by case:

(a) Permitted Uses. The court may allow a party to present an illustrative aid to help the trier of fact understand the evidence or argument if the aid's utility in assisting comprehension is not substantially outweighed by the danger of unfair prejudice, confusing the issues, misleading the jury, undue delay, or wasting time.
(b) Use in Jury Deliberations. “An illustrative aid is not evidence and must not be provided to the jury during deliberations unless: (1) all parties consent; or (2) the court, for good cause, orders otherwise.”
(c) Record. When practicable, an illustrative aid used at trial must be entered into the record.
(d) Summaries of Voluminous Materials Admitted as Evidence. A summary, chart, or calculation admitted as evidence to prove the content of voluminous admissible evidence is governed by Rule 1006.

Subsection (b) is the practical consequence. Subsection (c) is the one people forget: get the aid into the record, because an aid that existed only on a screen is hard to review on appeal.

The four predicates of a Rule 1006 summary

Read as a checklist, the rule resolves into four requirements, with Rule 403 behind them.

The underlying material must be voluminous. Six invoices are not. Ninety days of server logs are.
The underlying material must be admissible. Not admitted — admissible. This is the predicate that fails most often in search matters and it is discussed below.
It cannot be conveniently examined in court. Rarely contested for data of this kind.
The proponent must make the originals or duplicates available to other parties for examination or copying at a reasonable time and place, and the court may order them produced in court.

The fourth predicate turns an evidentiary question into a discovery question. A summary whose underlying data was never produced draws an objection under Rule 1006(b) that has nothing to do with the quality of the analysis, and losing it costs you the exhibit.

The second predicate is where a search exhibit most often dies quietly. A chart summarizing an export nobody can lay a foundation for is a summary of inadmissible material, and the defect stays invisible until someone reads the rule closely.

Applied to the exhibits a search expert actually produces

Take the common exhibits one at a time and ask what the underlying material is, and whether it is admissible.

Sessions by channel over time. The underlying material is the client's own analytics data — the records its measurement system collected. That is a system record, capable of authentication under Rule 901(b)(9) or certification under Rule 902(13), and the client can produce the export. A good Rule 1006 base.

Crawl error rollups and redirect tables. The underlying material is crawl output: what each URL returned when requested, including the status code the server sent. Reproducible, describable as a process, and voluminous — provided you produce the raw crawl and not just the tidy table.

Link acquisition timelines. The underlying material is a third-party index of links pointing to a site, built by a vendor's crawler with coverage nobody outside the vendor can characterize. Usable, but the foundation is about the vendor's process, and that has to be addressed rather than assumed.

Rankings over time. This is the hard one. The underlying material is usually a rank tracker — a commercial service that runs a list of queries on a schedule from a configured location and records where a given URL appeared. As the sole basis for a damages exhibit that is a real weakness, and I would say so of my own work: the queries, location, device, and sampling are the vendor's choices, the vendor will not certify anything, and results genuinely vary between users. Where the same point can be made from the client's own search console data or server logs, that is the stronger Rule 1006 base; where it cannot, the exhibit's limits belong in the report rather than in a cross-examination.

The line between a summary and an argument

A Rule 1006 summary summarizes. The moment it argues, it is either a Rule 107 aid or it is excluded under Rule 403, and the party that pushed too hard ends up with less than it would have had by asking for an aid. What pushes a chart across the line, in rough order of how often I see it:

A causal caption. “Traffic collapse caused by the migration” is a conclusion printed on an exhibit; “Organic sessions, weekly, 1 January 2023 to 31 December 2024” is a summary. The opinion belongs in testimony.
Axis manipulation. A truncated vertical axis, an inconsistent time interval, or a dual axis chosen so two unrelated series appear to move together.
Annotation. Arrows, shaded regions labeled with events, and callouts, all of which add argument on top of data.
Selective windows. A date range beginning after a confounding event and ending before a recovery summarizes a chosen subset, and the choice is the argument.
Mixed series. Recorded values and modeled estimates plotted on one line without labeling which is which.

A workable test: if a competent opponent could show the jury that the chart communicates something the underlying data does not, the exhibit is doing argument, and it should be rebuilt or offered as an aid. Building it faithfully costs nothing you cannot recover in testimony, where argument belongs and can be cross-examined fairly.

The decisions that determine this are made months earlier

By the time an exhibit list is due, whether your chart is evidence has already been settled, by these decisions:

Was the underlying data preserved in native form? A hand-edited spreadsheet is not the underlying material; it is a second summary with no audit trail.
Is the source of each series identifiable? Every line needs a stated source, date range, and collection method, because each is a separate admissibility question.
Was it produced, and when? Rule 1006(b) requires availability at a reasonable time and place. Production during discovery satisfies that comfortably; production on the eve of trial invites a fight.
Is the derivation reproducible? A script or stated query turning raw data into the chart lets you demonstrate faithfulness. Manual steps in a spreadsheet can only be described.
Was the summary disclosed in the report? The exhibit and its data are part of the basis of the opinion, and an exhibit first appearing at trial has a disclosure problem as well as an evidentiary one.

None of that is trial work. It is capture, preservation, and documentation done at the start of the engagement, which is why the exhibit question is a workflow question wearing a rule number.

When an illustrative aid is the right answer anyway

Some exhibits are not summaries of data and never will be. A diagram of how a search engine crawls, indexes, and ranks pages. A schematic of a redirect chain — the sequence of automatic forwards a browser follows from an old URL to a current one. A cutaway of a results page. None of those summarizes voluminous material; each exists to help a jury understand testimony.

Those are Rule 107 aids and that is the correct home for them. Build them as aids, ask that they be entered into the record under Rule 107(c), and plan on the assumption they will not go back with the jury — under Rule 107(b) they do not, absent consent from all parties or a good-cause order.

The default for everything else is Rule 1006. Build to the summary rule: faithful, non-argumentative, sourced, derived from produced admissible material, and reproducible from it. If it qualifies, it is evidence and it goes to the jury room; if the court disagrees, an exhibit built to that standard is still usable as an aid. An exhibit built as argument has nowhere to fall back to. Both rules are published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell — Rule 1006 and Rule 107 — and they are short enough to read in full before an exhibit conference.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does an expert's chart go into the jury room?

It depends which rule it came in under. A summary, chart, or calculation admitted under FRE 1006 is substantive evidence and goes to the jury like any other exhibit. An illustrative aid under FRE 107 is not evidence and, under Rule 107(b), must not be provided to the jury during deliberations unless all parties consent or the court, for good cause, orders otherwise. The distinction has been explicit in the rules since 1 December 2024, and it is determined by how the exhibit was built and what data supports it.

What changed on 1 December 2024?

Rule 1006 was amended and Rule 107 was created; both were adopted by the Supreme Court on 2 April 2024 and took effect on 1 December 2024, alongside amendments to Rules 613, 801(d)(2), and 804(b)(3). The amendment made explicit that a Rule 1006 summary is admitted as evidence, whether or not the underlying voluminous material has been introduced. Rule 107 gave illustrative aids their own rule, confirming they are not evidence and setting the conditions for their use and for entry into the record.

Do the underlying documents have to be admitted for a Rule 1006 summary?

No. Rule 1006(a) permits admission of a summary of voluminous admissible material whether or not the underlying material has been introduced into evidence. The material must be admissible, not admitted. What the proponent must do, under Rule 1006(b), is make the underlying originals or duplicates available to other parties for examination or copying at a reasonable time and place; the court may also order them produced in court. Failure on that procedural requirement is a common and avoidable way to lose the exhibit.

What makes a chart an illustrative aid rather than a summary?

Function. Rule 1006(c) provides that a summary, chart, or calculation functioning only as an illustrative aid is governed by Rule 107. In practice a chart drifts into aid territory when it does something beyond faithfully compressing data: a causal caption, annotations and arrows, a truncated axis, a date window chosen to exclude a confounding event, or modeled estimates plotted alongside recorded values without labeling. A summary that argues is also exposed under Rule 403, which continues to apply to accuracy and argumentativeness.

Can a damages chart be based on third-party rank tracking data?

It can be built from it, but as the sole basis it is a real weakness. A rank tracker runs a chosen set of queries on a schedule from a configured location and device; the query list, the location, the device, and the sampling are the vendor's choices, results vary legitimately between users, and the vendor will not certify how the numbers were produced. Rule 1006 requires that the underlying material be admissible. Where the same point can be shown from the client's own search console data or server logs, that is the stronger foundation.

What does Rule 1006(b) require the proponent to produce?

The underlying originals or duplicates, made available for examination or copying, or both, by other parties at a reasonable time and place; and the court may order the proponent to produce them in court. In a data case that means the actual exports, logs, or crawl files behind the chart, in a form the other side can examine, produced in discovery rather than on the eve of trial. A hand-edited spreadsheet is not the underlying material, because it is itself a summary with no audit trail back to the source.

Should an exhibit be built as a Rule 1006 summary by default?

For anything that compresses data, yes. An exhibit built to the summary standard — faithful, sourced, non-argumentative, derived from admissible material that has been produced, and reproducible from that material — is evidence if the court accepts it and is still perfectly usable as an illustrative aid if the court does not. An exhibit built as argument has no fallback: it will not qualify under Rule 1006, and under Rule 107(b) it will not accompany the jury into deliberations.

Published 2026-08-11

Summaries Versus Illustrative Aids