If you are a coder, extracting an accurate meaning from legalese should come naturally. Just slow the flippety-flop down, stop trying to read it like a book, and instead read it like you are a compiler.
I just read a case law week about whether "or" in a patent claim should be interpreted as OR or XOR.
Better language (assuming it is how the thing works) is: "determining foo based on one or more of x, y, or z"
The strange language in claims (and patents in general) is a response to litigation. Good patent prosecutors (the patent attorneys that draft patents) watch court cases and adjust their claim language accordingly.
Good patent litigators try to tear up or dissect the claim language (as well as everything else...). So patent prosecutors should draft with an eye toward litigation and include language that inoculates a patent from common or obvious attacks.
In my experience, not being a lawyer, but working with people with legal educations on queries for document review, they didn't generally seem to "get" logical concepts like the idea that precedence of boolean operators matters to interpretation.
Maybe people who went to top tier law schools are better or something.
