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D.C. Letter 13: The Exhibit Index, P-Numbers and R-Numbers

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When to Use It

D.C. has no document subpoena and no discovery (DC-Tool 18). The five-business-day disclosure is what carries the evidentiary weight discovery would carry elsewhere, and this index is how you keep that disclosure provable. Fill it in as your proof is assembled, and complete the disclosed-date column as you serve.

The federal floor requires disclosure of all evaluations and the recommendations based on them at least five business days before the hearing, subject to the hearing officer's discretionary bar if a party fails to do so and the other side will not consent to the evidence coming in anyway; it does not itself require you to disclose your other evidence in advance, but it gives every party the right to keep out any evidence, of any kind, that first reaches them inside that same five-business-day window (34 C.F.R. 300.512(a)(3), (b)). D.C.'s rule is broader than that floor on two points that belong in your process, not just in your head. First, the disclosure covers all evidence and the full witness list, not only evaluations, and it goes to ODR as well as to every other party, not to the other side alone. Second, if you or your attorney has a financial interest in a nonpublic provider or service at issue in your hearing, ownership, a fee discount, or a contingent referral or outcome arrangement, that interest must be disclosed inside the same five-day package under 5-A DCMR 3049.4 through 3049.5; expert fees are excluded from this particular disclosure. Both points are checked August 13, 2026 against ODR SOP 504 and 34 C.F.R. 300.512(b).

The numbering convention is P-numbers for the parent's exhibits and R-numbers for the respondent's, common in practice but not fixed by any DCMR or SOP text; an individual hearing officer's prehearing order controls the exact format, including whether exhibits are bound and tabbed for the officer, mailed, or uploaded, and D.C.'s administratively thin, remote-default hearing makes electronic, continuously paginated exhibits the safer default to prepare even when the order does not say so in as many words Confirm your own prehearing order's pagination and file-format instructions before you finalize the index, because the standard operating procedures do not fix one format for every case and the order controls yours.. Do not assume a written exhibit-objection deadline exists after disclosure. No SOP or DCMR provision creates a two- or three-business-day post-disclosure objection window; exhibit admissibility is ruled on live, at the start of the hearing, unless your specific hearing officer's prehearing order imposes a stricter written deadline as case-specific practice. Read your prehearing order for that instruction rather than assuming a system-wide rule.

Use it with: DC-Tool 20 (the exhibit set and the five-business-day disclosure) and DC-Tool 24 (the prehearing conference and the order that governs your case).