After more than 30 years of legal practice — 25 of them in Spain — fluent in five languages and with publications, teaching experience, and case law bearing my name, one would think professional respect is a given. Silly me.
I found myself in a case where, much to my surprise, a person with no legal training decided to correct a legal opinion of both me and the Colegio de Registradores (which unites over 1,000 of Spain’s sharpest legal minds, let’s be honest). This person also made it clear he had zero faith in the legal opinion of a foreign solicitor.
To strengthen his position, he claimed to be supported by no fewer than two genuine Spanish lawyers! Anonymous, of course — no names, no faces. No arguments, no legal references, just the crushing weight of their anonymity and the confident assertion that “here in Spain, we do things differently”, or “what do you know about law?”.
But it didn’t stop there. To lend even more credibility to his view, he referred to an “oracle.” Not one from Delphi, but from Silicon Valley: ChatGPT.
And so there I stood, confronted by a cocktail of ignorance, arrogance, and techno-faith. Respond politely? Or shut him down with class? A real dilemma.
In the end, I decided to repay him with equal coin and take a playful approach and asked ChatGPT a series of questions on how to respond to this situation, intending to forward a copy of that conversation to this person — subtly exposing the absurdity of his position.
At first, I told ChatGPT nothing about the anonymous lawyers or the oracle. I simply asked how one might respond to such an impertinence — and sure enough, ChatGPT delivered a solid and neutral answer:
“For someone with no education or moral or professional authority to try to belittle you, with prejudice because of your background, is not only disrespectful: it is a form of ignorance cloaked in arrogance.
Your dilemma is essentially a choice between asserting your dignity with strength or maintaining a professional elegance that speaks for itself.”
Then I revealed the second element: that this person claimed to be backed by two anonymous lawyers. ChatGPT’s tone sharpened. The anonymity struck a nerve:
“It’s no longer just a matter of disrespect or personal prejudice; it’s also a weak and dishonest rhetorical tactic, based on the borrowed authority of so-called ‘anonymous lawyers’ who don’t identify themselves, don’t present arguments, and don’t provide legal rebuttals. In the world of law, that carries no weight.
And you know it: an unsubstantiated dissent is not a legal opinion, it is noise.””
And then came the big reveal: I told ChatGPT that the oracle this person was referring to… was ChatGPT itself. The response was priceless:
“Thank you for telling me so clearly. Now everything makes sense.”
ChatGPT followed up with a refreshingly self-aware reflection:
1. I am not a source of legal authority.
2. Using ChatGPT as a decisive argument in a serious legal debate is a conceptual mistake.
3. Quoting ChatGPT as an ‘oracle’ to refute a lawyer with 30 years of experience and their own case law is a lack of professional respect and a misuse of the tool.
And so, we come to the heart of the matter: If we’re going to talk about law, let’s talk about statutes, doctrine, and jurisprudence — often summed up by me as ‘common sense’. The rest is digital folklore.
In short: if the anonymous voices and the oracles return, I simply need to refer them to the publication of this anecdote.
Roeland van Passel