IANAL

IANAL is a Usenet and chat abbreviation (acronym) for I am not a lawyer. A similar abbreviation, TINLA, stands for This is not legal advice.

One or both of these abbreviations usually precede opinions about law warning people not to take their opinion as professional legal advice. Many jurisdictions have legal restrictions on actually giving or even appearing to give legal advice, or otherwise practicing as a lawyer without legal qualifications and official registration. See the practice of law.

This expression became more and more common on online web forums starting from the year 2000, when debate about file sharing and peer-to-peer applications started to focus on Copyright, privacy, and fair use issues. Frequently, people start their comments with IANAL to say that they are not a legal professional before stating their opinion. Sometimes, in a somewhat humorous way, one of the chat participants is actually a lawyer, and will start his message with IAAL ( I am a lawyer ).

A variant of IANAL is IANYL ( I am not your lawyer ), which is used by lawyers when posting comments on message boards to indicate that they are, in fact, attorneys, but they don t represent the reader and their comments are not subject to attorney-client privilege.

Other variations of IANAL refer to different fields, such as IANAMD for I am not a Medical Doctor. These serve the same general purpose as IANAL—to discourage the use of the information as actual professional advice.