Screenshots of Documents in Expert Witness Reports
When I'm writing my reports, I frequently reference source documents. Over time, I'm made a number of changes to the way that I do this, increasingly trying to make it clear that the words I'm presenting are not my own.
For example, in my current report template, document excerpts are inset in a shaded background, and written in a different font. Like this:
![](https://thealienists.org/content/images/2022/06/CleanShot-2022-06-21-at-06.58.11@2x.png)
Increasingly, I've been inserting images of the documents as screenshots, which preserves the formatting (great for tables), and is the most transparent representation of the source material.
![](https://thealienists.org/content/images/2022/06/CleanShot-2022-06-22-at-14.03.18@2x.png)
If you'd like like to include some, there are a number of great tools for screenshots.
I currently use CleanShot X on MacOS, which is included in the SetApp subscription. It has easy pixelation and redaction tools, among a wealth of handy features.
![](https://cleanshot.com/img/ogimage.png)
A great free MacOS option is Shottr.
![](https://shottr.cc/assets/page-preview.jpg)
For Windows, I recommend the free and feature-rich ShareX. It has a boatload of features, but unfortunately, it's not as user-friendly. (If you're a Windows user who knows a better option, please drop me a line.)
![](https://getsharex.com/img/ShareX_Card_Large.png)
To make it easy to take screenshots, I set up buttons on my Stream Deck. The one below lets me select a rectangular area and sends to CleanShot for editing, but also puts it right on the clipboard so I can just paste it into the document if no editing is necessary.
![](https://thealienists.org/content/images/2022/06/camera.viewfinder.png)
So far, this has been a good addition to the formatting shown above, but not yet a complete replacement. It's not a great fit for every source document or report, but it's a good tool to have at your disposal.