Texas lawyer credits AI for defeating Meta, Google

Mark Lanier, a Texas trial attorney, said AI helped his team prepare for a monthslong social media addiction case against Meta and Google—allowing them to process transcripts, documents, and jury notes faster inside and outside court. The jury found the compan

One morning in February, Mark Lanier woke up after four hours of sleep and headed back into trial mode—preparing to cross-examine Mark Zuckerberg, one of the wealthiest people in the world.

His team had worked through the night, assembling materials for the day ahead. Lanier said they relied on AI to help them do far more with the limited hours they had to prepare outside the courtroom during a trial that lasted over a month.

“If I have 10 additional workers who are incredibly well-trained. who know the file inside and out. who work 24 hours a day and don’t even need to take a break for the restroom. much less PTO. ” Lanier told Business Insider. adding. “In the 10 hours I might be working outside of court. I can get 30 hours of work done.”.

Lanier’s claims land in the middle of a broader debate about whether AI is a practical tool for legal work or a source of costly errors. He acknowledged that AI in law has been touted both as a major opportunity and a cautionary tale. with stories of hallucinations and fake citations. He said, in his own hands, it has been “a total game changer.”.

The outcome of the case helped validate that conviction. Lanier won the lawsuit against Meta and Google. The jury found the companies negligent and ruled they knew their platforms were “dangerous” but failed to warn the plaintiff. The plaintiff was awarded $6 million. The case became a bellwether for thousands of similar lawsuits brought against social media companies.

How Lanier described it to court-watchers wasn’t just faster work. He said AI changed what his team could attempt during the pressure of trial schedules.

He said the AI tool he relied on before and during the landmark trial was Boodlebox, calling it “Disney World compared to a swing set in the backyard.”

Boodlebox, a leader in the education technology space, gives users access to major models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Lanier said he could switch between them or compare results. He also emphasized that it is collaborative. letting him and his legal team work with the AIs in the same digital workspace.

Lanier worked with Boodlebox to create a custom license that costs him six figures annually and is tailored to his needs. He described it as a way to compress decades of his own legal preparation into something the tools could mirror.

“We could, in essence, take my brain, take 42 years of my experience, take the things that I have learned and studied and published and not published and incorporate it into the brain that drove my AI queries and results,” Lanier said.

Even with that setup, Lanier said he keeps tight boundaries around what AI is allowed to do. He called the approach “trade craft,” and said his firm is “doing some things that nobody else is doing.”

One example he gave was using transcripts from court each day. His team would ask different models to evaluate them. He said AI was also useful for finding a more creative or visceral way to describe something in court. During the trial. he even fed AI jury notes that came up during deliberations. then asked it to evaluate where the jury was in the process.

At the end of each court day. Lanier described a rhythm in his “war room.” The team would debrief and assign tasks—such as pulling the five most critical documents supporting point A. After that, he said they did much of that work in Boodlebox. He then reviewed what they produced and how they built it.

Lanier said he and his team, including several of his daughters, spent thousands of hours on the platform.

A Boodlebox representative told Business Insider that while most of the platform’s clients are big universities, the company is also exploring more enterprise and law adoption. The representative linked that interest in part to Boodlebox’s work with Lanier.

Still, Lanier drew a hard line against the kind of hands-off use that can create serious problems in court.

He said he doesn’t use AI in the way that often gets people into trouble. “I’m not going to say, ‘Go do my research and write my brief,’” he said. He pointed to one instance in the case where AI cited something from the record and he knew it wasn’t correct.

“It’s not unbridled,” he said. “You are an important part of the equation.”

His advice to other lawyers trying to use AI was simple: keep up with the rapidly evolving field. He said he has an AI team at his firm that sends him a document every Friday with all the developments in AI, typically three pages single-spaced.

“Next trial, I will make what I did last trial look like Fred Flintstone and the Stone Age,” he said.

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