The upload panel tells you why a file was rejected. The four real causes:
Too large
The limit is 100 MB per file. Options, in order of preference:
- Split it. A 400 MB PDF of forty contracts should be forty documents anyway — then a citation can point at the contract rather than at a page number in a bundle.
- Re-export it. Scanned bundles are frequently many times larger than they need to be. Re-exporting at 200–300 dpi usually cuts the size dramatically with no loss of readability.
- Ask for the original. A native file is smaller and far more useful than a scan of a print of it.
Unsupported format
Supported: PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, CSV, plain text, Markdown, and common image formats. Not supported: archives, email container files, audio and video, proprietary CAD and database formats.
Extract the contents of an archive and upload the files. For an email thread, export it to PDF — and note that the export is what gets cited, so keep the headers.
Protected or corrupt
A password-protected or permission-restricted PDF will often upload and then yield nothing readable. Remove the restriction before uploading, or ask the target for an unrestricted copy. A file that will not open on your own machine will not open on ours either.
Interrupted upload
Large files over an unreliable connection fail partway. Retry; nothing partial is kept. If it fails repeatedly on one file and succeeds on others, the file is the problem, not the connection.
When the file uploads but the content is empty
That is a parse problem, not an upload problem — see When a section says there is no evidence, step 3.
Still failing
Raise a support ticket with the file name, its size, the message you saw, and the project. Do not attach the document itself to the ticket if it is confidential — we will tell you where to put it.