[sic]

I'm learning that of all the appellate tricks in the attorney attache-bag, the favorite seems to be dropping the [sic] bomb. The idea is to scour the opposing counsel's brief, find every typo you possibly can (and you'd be amazed at how many seriously bad typos you'll find in briefs, it makes this blog look like it's edited by the folks at The New York Review of Books) and then find ways to incorporate those typos into your filings in opposition.

For example, if you find a line that says "has exhausted hi claims" in a habeas petition, then you write in response "petitioner claims that he has exhausted hi claims" [sic]. Those three letters really say a lot, because as everyone knows "sic" is latin for "opposing counsel is an illiterate jackass." At least, that's the impression I feel the quoter is trying to convey when I read this stuff. I don't have any empirical evidence on this yet, but I have a feeling that putting a typo in a sentence triples that sentence's chances of being quoted. That's just fcuked up.