Good question. Unfortunately, handouts are counted towards the word limit.
If you can’t squeeze them in so your submission’s close to the 30k word limit, you’ll need to exclude them from your submission.
Once the jam’s over, you can add the case files back as an optional handout.
copies of some old DG case files
A trick to save the wordcount may be to have the files incomplete/redacted, but still functional. That way you’re only spending your budget on the words that have high priority.
but it would blow my word count out
How much would it blow your word count?