Legal News: Sea Sponge Edition

Okay, this was just too funny to not blog about.

We all know that it's important to proofread a brief before you submit it to the court -- few things undermine your credibility more than rampant spelling errors. But it's important to note that proofreading entails more than simply running the spell checker. (Note to Derek: when running the spell checker, make sure the spell checker knows the proper spelling for "appellant.")

Of course, there's nothing wrong with using the spell check. I even heartily recommend the practice. But you need to exercise some oversight, and not simply have the program automatically make all the corrections it wants. (Seriously, who actually does this? Half the time the spell checker suggests some crazy alternative for a mistyped word...) Word processing programs frequently don't like legal jargon -- I think it has a hard time with Latin. Some might circumvent this problem by adding common legal terms to the spell checker's dictionary. What you don't want to do is let the spell checker run amok. A San Francisco attorney recently learned the hard way about dangers of relying on spell check's automatic corrections.

Almost any first year soon becomes familiar with the term sua sponte. But the spell checker becomes very confused by this string of letters. The closest approximation based on its algorithm is... "sea sponge." Which anyone should recognize means something completely different. (I actually tried this on Microsoft Word, and it came up with "sue sponge.") So relying on the spell checker leads to such wackiness as:

"It is well settled that a trial court must instruct sea sponge on any defense, including a mistake of fact defense."

I imagine it would be hard for a court to take you seriously after a sentence like that. Plus, the judge is more likely to think of this, when you'd rather be pictured as this.

Fun fact: you can reverse the trick at dictionary.com!

So be careful when checking over those briefs. Supervise your spell checker. And read your brief over -- actual proofreading -- before submitting it. Otherwise people may think your head is filled with this instead of this (though it is interesting how they do kind of look similar...).