The lawyer who beat Meta in a landmark addiction trial says AI was his secret weapon

Mark Lanier, the Texas trial lawyer who won a landmark $6 million verdict against Meta and Google in a social media addiction case in March, says AI was central to his preparation and execution throughout the five-week trial. Lanier told Business Insider that the technology let him compress 30 hours of work into 10, describing it as having “10 additional workers who are incredibly well-trained, who know the file inside and out, who work 24 hours a day.” The case was the first social media addiction lawsuit to reach a jury verdict in the United States.

The jury found Meta and Google negligent and ruled their platforms were “dangerous,” awarding $3 million in compensatory damages and $3 million in punitive damages. Meta was held 70 per cent responsible and YouTube 30 per cent. The case is a bellwether for more than 1,500 similar lawsuits consolidated in federal multidistrict litigation, meaning its outcome could shape how thousands of pending claims against social media companies are resolved.

Lanier said his team used AI before and during the trial through Boodlebox, a multi-model platform primarily used in higher education that provides access to ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini within a single collaborative workspace. He worked with the company to create a custom licence costing six figures annually, tailored to incorporate his 42 years of trial experience into the AI’s context. Boodlebox serves more than 1,300 colleges and universities and told Business Insider it is exploring enterprise and legal adoption partly because of its work with Lanier.

The specific applications ranged from tactical to analytical. At the end of each court day, Lanier’s team would take that day’s transcripts and feed them to different AI models for evaluation. He used AI to find more persuasive ways to phrase arguments for the courtroom. During jury deliberations, he fed the jury’s written questions into AI models to assess where the panel stood in its decision-making process.

Each evening, the team met in a war room to debrief and assign tasks, such as pulling the five most critical documents supporting a particular argument. His team, which includes several of his daughters, would complete much of that work in Boodlebox overnight, allowing Lanier to review their output in the hours before court the next morning after what he described as four hours of sleep. He said the team spent thousands of hours on the platform during the case.

Lanier is deliberate about what AI does not do in his practice. He said he does not use it to write briefs or conduct legal research unsupervised, the exact use cases that have produced a growing crisis of AI hallucinations in courts. A database maintained by legal analyst Damien Charlotin has catalogued more than 1,300 cases worldwide where AI-generated filings contained fabricated citations, with reported incidents rising from roughly two per week in early 2025 to two or three per day by late 2025. Sullivan & Cromwell, one of the most prestigious law firms in the world, filed an emergency letter in April asking a bankruptcy judge to avoid sanctions after admitting its court filing contained AI-generated hallucinations.

Lanier acknowledged that AI got something wrong once during the case, citing a detail from the record that he knew was incorrect. “It’s not unbridled,” he said. “You are an important part of the equation.” His approach treats AI as a force multiplier for human judgment rather than a substitute for it, a distinction that the lawyers facing sanctions have often failed to make.

The irony of the case is hard to miss. Lanier used AI, the technology at the centre of the broader reckoning facing Meta and other tech companies, to beat one of the companies building it. Meta is spending between $125 billion and $145 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026, but in a Los Angeles courtroom, a trial lawyer with a six-figure AI subscription used the same underlying technology to secure a verdict that could influence thousands of additional lawsuits against the company.

Lanier’s firm now has a dedicated AI team that sends him a three-page briefing every Friday covering developments in the field. He said his next trial will make what he did in the Meta case “look like Fred Flintstone and the Stone Age.” With 69 per cent of legal professionals now reporting that they use generative AI for work-related tasks, according to industry surveys, the question is no longer whether AI will transform litigation but whether lawyers will use it responsibly enough to avoid becoming cautionary tales themselves.