Here’s How to Learn Legalese as a Business Owner
Whenever I talk to a solopreneur or small business owner about the law, they always express frustration about how hard it is to understand legalese and navigate legal processes in their business.
I always take the time to hear them out and validate their frustrations, but I also like to tell them the same thing that I’ll tell you now:
You can’t learn legalese in a vacuum.
The truth is that learning legalese isn’t as simple as reading that contract or that legal document and immediately understanding what it means.
But it’s also not nearly as complicated (or expensive) as spending hundreds of thousands of dollars and three years in law school.
If you want to learn legalese, you need three things:
Context;
Technical knowledge; and
Opportunities to practice.
Context tells you the circumstances in which the law at issue is occurring under. Those circumstances help you identify which parts of the law matter and which parts don’t. I’ll explain more below.
Technical knowledge is exactly what it sounds like: it’s knowing what basic legal terms in the law mean. In your case, it’s probably knowing what basic business legal terms are in your industry. If you’re here, I’m guessing you’re a solopreneur or small business owner service provider. If that’s the case, then a lot of the legal terms you need to know live inside of contracts.
Opportunities to practice is, again, exactly what it sounds like: you have to be willing to treat every legal issue in your business like a learning opportunity. You have to accept that learning legalese is not a thing that happens overnight. It’s something that happens gradually with time and a willingness to practice. Especially if your ultimate goal is to feel confident and comfortable managing the legal issues in your business.
So let’s dive deeper into what it looks like to learn legalese through context, technical knowledge, and practice.
Context:
Trying to learn legalese without context is pretty much a lost cause. Because context and understanding the situation in which the legal issue arose is how you figure out whether the law matters, and, if so, which laws matter.
So let’s start with the most obvious question: when it comes to the law, what kind of context do you need?
Well, that depends. The law is less like a series of requirements and more like a rotating buffet of options. All that to say that the law is one big gray area. But when I’m teaching legalese to a solopreneur or small business owner who is also a service provider, here is the context that usually matters:
Risk: One issue people have when they’re trying to learn legalese and understand what it means is that they have no sense of their own relationship to risk. I always ask people how they feel about risk. Are you risk averse? If you are, are you extremely risk-averse or more moderate? Or are you the opposite? Do you have a really high-risk tolerance?
A good way to gauge your risk tolerance is to consider how much time you spend worrying about something bad happening in your business. And, if you do worry about something bad happening in your business, is it the kind of worry that keeps you up at night? Or the kind that makes you second-guess all your business decisions?
If it is, then you have a low-risk tolerance profile. This will impact how you engage in something like negotiating a contract. People with low-risk tolerance might want to take steps to mitigate their risk independent from the terms of a contract like getting business insurance, and they’ll be extremely keen on limiting their exposure to potential liability (lawsuits) in a contract.
Having that context of what your risk is and also being able to figure out what another person or company’s risk tolerance is (like that company you’re performing services for) will help you better understand the law at issue. Specifically, it will help you determine how likely a certain legal situation is to occur, whether it matters, and what to do about it.
Power Dynamics: I can’t stress this enough: learning legalese isn’t just about understanding what the words mean. It’s also about knowing who does and doesn’t have the power to enforce those words and how they’ll exercise that power.
Remember this, friend: just because the law says something doesn’t mean it matters. The truth is that the law only really matters when someone has the time, space, energy, and money to enforce it.
Similar to risk tolerance, clearly understanding power dynamics can tell you whether that legal thing matters or not.
Now, power can come in more than one form. It’s not just money; it’s also influence. It’s also resources in the form of people, specifically lawyers. If someone has easy access to a bunch of lawyers and the power to influence them to act or money to pay them to act, that means they have quite a bit of power and a high capacity to enforce the law (make it matter).
Someone who has less money and more trouble accessing a lawyer is going to have less power and therefore less able to enforce the law.
Yes, I know this isn’t exactly fair, but it is the reality of things. Knowing where you stand on the power scale and where the people you’re dealing with stand on that scale impacts how you navigate the legal-related decisions in your business.
So if you want to learn legalese in a way that actually allows you to understand the law and be strategic about the legal issues in your business, then you need to think about power dynamics.
Okay, I only hit on two types of contextual knowledge that are key to learning legalese, but what I want you to take away from this is that context informs how you understand, think about, and strategize about the legal issues in your business. Whenever you’re trying to interpret a legal issue in your business, you always want to turn to context first. Identify the contextual clues as the first step to understanding the issue and then use those clues to decipher the legalese.
Technical Knowledge (the actual legalese)
I’ll just start with an unpopular opinion: your lack of technical knowledge about what certain legal terms mean isn’t the thing keeping you from learning legalese.
There are now tons of resources on the internet that help you translate legalese into plain English. I know of many folks who copy and paste full legal documents into chat GPT and ask it to tell them what it means in plain language.
So when it comes to technical knowledge, that now lies at your fingertips friends. You can google what the term means, use AI, or ask your community of fellow entrepreneurs what certain terms mean and/or if they have experience with a specific legal issue.
That means something else is at the root of what we perceive to be a lack of technical legal knowledge. In my experience working with solopreneurs and small business owners, there are usually 2 things that make technical knowledge feel inaccessible and/or difficult:
Fear and/or discomfort with anything and everything legal;
A lack of context and therefore an inability to understand what that legalese means in this particular circumstance.
For the first issue, reducing fear of and/or discomfort with the law is a matter of exposure. The trick is to expose yourself to the law in small doses that your nervous system can actually handle. If you do to much too soon, you’ll blow out your nervous system and cope by avoiding the law going forward.
So do small stuff. For instance, reading this blog post is a small thing. Following me on social media is another thing. And joining my newsletter is another small thing you can do.
If the law makes you tense up, then putting yourself in low-stakes learning environments sooner rather than later is the way to go. You want to expose yourself to the law as much as possible as early as possible, preferably before a legal thing that matters a lot comes up in your business so you have some established comfortability with the law.
Building familiarity with the law through practiced exposure will also support your comprehension of legalese. The less activated your nervous system is when you’re engaging with the law (aka the more comfortable you are), the better your executive functioning will be.
So to recap, I recommend 3 things when it comes to obtaining better technical knowledge of the law:
Use AI to translate the law to plain language or search for articles that explain what legal terms mean in plain language. When you do this, consider creating a document that you can refer back to with all of these definitions.
Touch the law in small doses if it stresses you out. Continuous small touches will teach your nervous system how to regulate itself so you can properly access your executive function when you’re trying to understand it.
Remember that context is everything with the law. Focus on the context clues that help you interpret, be strategic about, and learn legalese in a way that enables you to make confident business decisions.
Now Let’s Talk About Practice
And not in the Alan Iverson way. IYKYK, lol.
Unless you’re a lawyer or a legal educator like me, then it’s unlikely that you’re dealing with the law every day in your business.
That can be tough when you’re trying to learn legalese because learning inherently requires consistent practice. And the truth is that most solopreneurs and small business owners aren’t regularly dealing with legal issues in their business. That pesky legalese only shows up every now and then.
So how do you approach learning something and building comfort with something when the opportunities to do so are inconsistent?
Treat every legal issue in your business as a learning opportunity.
Engage with free resources from people who talk about the law for a living. Follow us on social media, read our blogs, and join our newsletters.
Remember that the law is rarely urgent. It just feels urgent because your body is in a stress response. Manage the stress response first, then engage with the law. Take your time with it.
Ask questions. So many people I work with feel like they can’t ask a question about something legal, whether it’s a term in a contract or about a legal entity they are thinking of registering. Ask the question, please. The more questions you ask, the more you’re likely to learn. Question-asking is an active learning technique.
If you’re in entrepreneurship communities, participate in conversations about the law. I’m in a couple of communities and people semi-regularly ask questions about the law. Participate in those convos by reading all the responses, asking a question if you have one, and/or proposing a possible solution if you think you have one. It will help you learn and make you feel less alone in trying to figure this legal stuff out.
If you’re looking for opportunities to practice with me, you can join my newsletter where I regularly share tips for building familiarity with the law and announce my upcoming workshops and other offerings.
As you continue on your learning legalese journey, remember this:
You don’t need to master the law to make good business decisions; you just need to know enough about it to know which questions to ask and who to ask about them so you can make good business decisions.
If you liked this article, you might also like Why Business Law is Important For Entrepreneurs.