When I was a teenager, I thought legalese was this extremely advanced fancy jargon that very few normal humans could interpret, and you needed a fancy law degree to have any level of confidence that they didn’t define night as day, or use the plain language of “red” to mean “blue.”
As an adult, I no longer have that view.
I think most of the time, you can just read things carefully for yourself and be 95% right. And if you additionally employ other tools at your disposal (critical thinking, Google searches, AI), you can be ~99% right.
Now the difference between ~99% and 99.9% or 99.99% (nobody’s 100% right, the interpretation of the law famously has subjective boundaries even among domain experts) can be critical. Especially in adversarial contexts, the clauses that might screw you over, or at least cause major headaches later on, could be subtly hidden in the .9-.99% of exceptions. That’s why for important contracts, it’s important to get a real domain expert/specialized lawyer on your side to be sure you didn’t miss anything extremely important.
But since you can just be 95-99% right yourself if you try, it means legalese isn’t this fancy black box that layman have no hope of understanding, most of the time. It also means if you see someone getting >50% of the law wrong, it’s most likely not because the actual questions’s “subjective,” or because of a skill issue with reading.
It’s more likely that someone (could be you!) a) hasn’t actually tried to carefully read the law, b) were verbally manipulated with a specific interpretation before they started reading, or c) had a really strong desire to believe the contract said a thing it didn’t, and gaslit themselves into ignoring plain language.
Agreed. I’ll also note that certain legal domains are more jargon heavy and therefore more prone to misinterpretation than other domains. When I started as an international tax lawyer, I often failed to recognize tax terms of art and therefore made silly mistakes (which were caught by partner review! Hopefully!). There’s lots of peril in applying a layman’s interpretation of regulation heavy tax terms.
That said, based on my experience, AI can get you pretty far for more common/well discussed tax questions. Gemini 3.1 thinking is still not so great with ambiguous answers, often opting to hallucinate instead of telling you the answer is unsettled.
When I was a teenager, I thought legalese was this extremely advanced fancy jargon that very few normal humans could interpret, and you needed a fancy law degree to have any level of confidence that they didn’t define night as day, or use the plain language of “red” to mean “blue.”
As an adult, I no longer have that view.
I think most of the time, you can just read things carefully for yourself and be 95% right. And if you additionally employ other tools at your disposal (critical thinking, Google searches, AI), you can be ~99% right.
Now the difference between ~99% and 99.9% or 99.99% (nobody’s 100% right, the interpretation of the law famously has subjective boundaries even among domain experts) can be critical. Especially in adversarial contexts, the clauses that might screw you over, or at least cause major headaches later on, could be subtly hidden in the .9-.99% of exceptions. That’s why for important contracts, it’s important to get a real domain expert/specialized lawyer on your side to be sure you didn’t miss anything extremely important.
But since you can just be 95-99% right yourself if you try, it means legalese isn’t this fancy black box that layman have no hope of understanding, most of the time. It also means if you see someone getting >50% of the law wrong, it’s most likely not because the actual questions’s “subjective,” or because of a skill issue with reading.
It’s more likely that someone (could be you!) a) hasn’t actually tried to carefully read the law, b) were verbally manipulated with a specific interpretation before they started reading, or c) had a really strong desire to believe the contract said a thing it didn’t, and gaslit themselves into ignoring plain language.
Agreed. I’ll also note that certain legal domains are more jargon heavy and therefore more prone to misinterpretation than other domains. When I started as an international tax lawyer, I often failed to recognize tax terms of art and therefore made silly mistakes (which were caught by partner review! Hopefully!). There’s lots of peril in applying a layman’s interpretation of regulation heavy tax terms.
That said, based on my experience, AI can get you pretty far for more common/well discussed tax questions. Gemini 3.1 thinking is still not so great with ambiguous answers, often opting to hallucinate instead of telling you the answer is unsettled.