sea sponge instructions

I hate the fact that some lawyers believe that spell-check is the end of proofreading, not just the beginning. Oh, it's so easy to do. It's also so easy not to add technical terms--like law Latin--as defined terms in one's dictionary.

So easy, and so wrong.

This poor bastard actually submitted an appellate brief in which the phrase "sua sponte" was transmogrified into "sea sponge" at least five times, leading to: "It is well settled that a trial court must instruct sea sponge on any defense, including a mistake of fact defense."

Actually, perhaps the better part of valor is for us lawyers to stop using stuffy Latin phrases, although there is really no substitute in English for phrases like sua sponte and--my absolute favorite--mutatis mutandis. Oddly enough, I just typed the phrase "mutatis mutandis" into a blank Word document and spell-checked it, and Word agreed that it was correctly spelled. I must have it well-trained.