Disclaimers have legal effect. If you include a disclaimer that you are not providing legal advice, and that your discussion is limited solely to specific issues (and may not include all issues raised by the fact pattern at hand), you will not be liable.
That does not mean you cannot be sued; anyone can be sued. But it does mean that you would win any lawsuit against.
I am a lawyer. (In my particular field, the magical disclaimer is the Circular 230 Notice regarding tax advice.)
Given that your advice is at odds with advice I have received in the past, I will now make no further attempts to share my experiences in these matters.
Your experience is still relevant -- disclaimers don't work in every context. The danger is more relevant for a practitioner than a non-practitioner, since courts will interpret disclaiming language in favor of the "client".
However, based on your comment, it sounds more like you are referring to "hedging language" about the reliability of advice offered rather than an explicit disclaimers that the content is not legal advice.
I too am a lawyer and while I agree that disclaimers have legal effect, I disagree that including a disclaimer necessarily relieves one of liability. In my jurisdiction, what is more critical is whether the recipient of the information believes it to be legal advice and whether the giver of information should realize the recipient may so believe.
Same in Ohio and Cali; that is why the disclaimer must explicitly state that legal advice is not being provided. The key is that it must be reasonable for the recipient to believe that they are receiving legal advice. If they are explicitly told that they are not receiving legal advice, they cannot reasonably rely on what they are told.
That does not mean you cannot be sued; anyone can be sued. But it does mean that you would win any lawsuit against.
I am a lawyer. (In my particular field, the magical disclaimer is the Circular 230 Notice regarding tax advice.)