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If someone who is not a lawyer is giving out legal advice, does it make any difference if they include a disclaimer along the lines of "this is not legal advice"?

For the purposes of this question, I assume legal advice means one party instructing another party on how to comply with laws (like a consultant might do).

Do they disclaim some kind of liability? Do they merely avoid suggesting they are lawyers when they're not?

In most jurisdictions, practicing law without a bar license is a serious offence, which, inter alia, is the primary reason why a non-lawyer would use this disclaimer.

Lawyers also use this disclaimer to avoid any 'constructive implication' of attorney-client relationship.

This is not legal advice.

If I say "this is not legal advice", and you rely on what I say, and try to sue me if everything goes pear shaped, then a judge will laugh you out of court.

If I don't say "this is not legal advice", there is a 99% chance that the judge will laugh you out of court. I'll cover the one percent.

If you're talking with a friend, a disclaimer like this should not be necessary, as they know you're not a lawyer, and you're just expressing lay opinion, personal anecdotes, etc.

But if you're in a context where the audience doesn't know who you are, there's a possibility that they might assume you're qualified to dispense legal advice. For instance, this very site probably gets many answers from legal professionals, and readers might assume that answers that seem well researched (e.g. citing court cases) are from such posters. If you're not one of them, this might then be construed as practicing law without a license, which could get you legal trouble.

But even if it isn't taken that far, someone might take action that assumes you really know what you're talking about. There might not be legal repercussions on you, but you should still feel bad about leading them the wrong way.

The disclaimer should protect you from any legal liability, and hopefully will also warn people that they should take your advice with a grain of salt. It's easy to state, and there's practically no downside, so it's best to be safe.

Disclaimer: IANAL

If someone who is not a lawyer is giving out legal advice, does it make any difference if they include a disclaimer along the lines of "this is not legal advice"?

The purpose of this disclaimer is to prevent someone from unreasonably relying on the advice while thinking that they are reasonably relying on legal advice. If the person who gave you some advice said it wasn't legal advice, it's hard to argue that you reasonably believed that it was legal advice you could reasonably rely on.

Say you were giving out something that you thought was delicious candy but were not sure wasn't poison. If is also looks like delicious candy, it makes sense for you to warn people that they cannot reasonably rely on your belief that it's not poison because you aren't qualified to tell them apart. You don't want someone to eat it just because you believe it's delicious candy if you aren't sure it's not poison, do you? A fair warning is in order.

In many jurisdictions, there is a general legal principle that people are entitled to trust certain kinds of professional opinion absent they have a particular reason not to. Someone who, e.g., build a balcony without hiring an engineer would have a duty to know what the structural requirements would be. If such a balcony collapsed because of bad design, the builder would be liable for breaching such duty. If, however, the builder were to hire a licensed engineer whose documented professional opinion was that it was safe, the duty to know about structural requirements, and the associated liability, could be transferred to that engineer (the exact circumstances where liability would transfer will vary by jurisdiction).

When a lawyer gives a professional opinion, the layer will often not only giving the client information, but will in many cases also be staking his status as a legal professional on the correctness thereof. A lawyer should not generally be willing to accept such risk without officially documenting all of the information upon which the opinion is based, and the amount of information needed to formulate an opinion that is 95% likely to be correct may be a tiny fraction of what would be needed to formulate an opinion that would be worth staking one's career.

Returning to the balcony example, if someone is considering building a balcony, they may want a rough idea of how much support it will need in order to decide whether the project is worth considering. If the the cost would be massively exceed the budget even given the most favorable ground conditions, there would be no point in ordering an examination of the ground for structural stability. If someone were to misinterpret a quick estimate of structural requirements suggesting that the product was viable, as though it were a reliable structural plan, and if they were to consequently build a balcony that collapsed as a result, the person who gave the estimate should not be liable since they hadn't given a professional opinion as to whether the ground quality was adequate for the suggested footings. Nonetheless, it would still be better for all concerned if the builder had hired a professional engineer.

Disclaimers are cheap. If adding a "No testing or analysis has been done to ensure the safety of this plan" disclaimer would have even a 0.001% chance of preventing someone from wrongfully assuming that the indicated structure could be safely built, that would be worth the cost of ink. Likewise IANAL, "this is not legal advice", etc.