If you start from the assumption that the law is whatever lawyers and judges tend to think it is, then access to lawyers is more important. If you take the egalitarian perspective that the law is the law and a lawyer is just someone particularly skilled in applying it, then a person of average eduction should be able to handle a routine legal dispute without paying a specialist. This is what people have in mind when they want to make the law more available online.
If there are laws out there that are currently applied or interpreted differently than their plain meaning as written down, that's a failure of government. Either legislators should have fixed a stupid law, or judges should have thrown it out for vagueness.
The problem is that both of your assumptions are true. The fact is that the law is constantly being discovered. To the extent that an area of law is well explored, a layperson should be empowered to handle it alone, but to the extent that it is not, it requires abilities that have not been instilled in the average citizen.
If there are laws out there that are currently applied or interpreted differently than their plain meaning as written down, that's a failure of government. Either legislators should have fixed a stupid law, or judges should have thrown it out for vagueness.