I was answering a letter from a reader earlier this morning. He’d had some problems with health insurance. Then, to compound that, he got cheated by a contractor when he was redoing his house….

It got me thinking. Besides medical bills, legal bills are probably the ordinary person’s worst nightmare.

In the US, you’re never too far from a lawsuit.  Even the slightest disagreement tends to erupt into a full-scale legal battle. We’re a litigious country, no two ways about that.

Earlier, I wrote down a few tips about doing without health insurance (it’s in my archives at Lew Rockwell). They seem to have helped a number of people.

But this evening I’m mulling over what I’ve learned about staying clear of the legal system, without being taken to the cleaners. And I’m wondering how I can help ordinary people protect themselves without lawyers. After all, it’s tough times, and most of us can barely get by, let alone factor in huge chunks of money for legal bills.

This is only a preliminary blog post, but here are my random thoughts:

1. Never sign a contract in a language you don’t know well.

(Does this sound obvious? There are, amazingly, people who actually sign off on documents that they’ve never read). People will often present you with a document in English and then follow that up with a document in another language, which they’ll tell you is the translation. Most of the time, it probably is a translation. But just occasionally, you’re going to get scammed.

If you’re not absolutely fluent in the language (and no – “donde esta buquebus” doesn’t count as fluent), or if you don’t have a trustworthy translator who can verify for you, you should hold off on signing.

2. Never sign a document that you “think” you read through before.

This is a common trick. Someone shows you one document and you read it from cover to cover.  An hour later, they ask you to sign what looks like the same document.  Take the time to go through it all over again. One missing phrase or line is all it takes to make the whole thing mean something radically different. Don’t fall for it.

3. Never sign anything so long you can’t read it carefully.

Doctors are especially good at waving 200-page binders crammed with abstruse medical terminology under your nose a day before surgery. They’ll wink and tell you “it’s just for the lawyers, ” as though that means you needn’t pay attention. But read that thing like a Talmudic scholar. Call up any lawyer or doctor you know and read out the passages you don’t understand to them.  If you can’t afford to pay a lawyer to read it for you, go online and study the subject so you at least have some inkling what it is you’re signing off on.

4. Cross-examine anyone who asks you to sign something.

It’s not very polite, but you’re not training for Ms. Manners. You’re trying to protect yourself. Write down every question you have and get your opposite number to write down his answer. Get him to sign it. He will probably try to brush the whole thing off, or say something like, “we always do business with a handshake.” Thank him for the biographical information, but tell him, “I always do business with a written contract.”

5. Don’t assume “is” means “is.”

Legalese is a language dense with man-traps and land-mines for the innocent. The whole object is to be as opaque and misleading as possible. Remember these things are written by 400 buck-an-hour suits, not Renaissance wits. If something can ramble, be incomprehensible, ambiguous, senseless, contradictory…or all of the above…it will be. While you’re reading it, keep a dictionary next to you, a handbook of contract law, and the phone number of a lawyer.