It's not just the legal industry, it's the legislators. I used to be friends with a former state senator, who had a background in forensic accounting. She said they purposely made the bills harder to parse than necessary so it was hard to figure out what they were actually doing. Given enough time, people could do it but in practice there wasn't time before voting on the bill, and that was on purpose too. Of course some of it was to reward lobbyists or do other unpopular things, but she used to read bills from back to front because the back was where they put all the graft. An example I remember was $50K in taxpayer money going to a congressman's birthday party.

For a while I thought about trying to write software that would turn the obscure natural-language diffs in written bills into a readable diff, showing the laws before and after with highlighted changes. But she said they just got the bills as paper printouts which weren't always even up-to-date, so it might not have helped much. Maybe now they're online. And LLMs might make the project easier.