This lawyer used AI to prepare his case against Meta and won Rs 57 Crores from Mark Zuckerberg
Follow UsTexas lawyer Mark Lanier used AI tools to help prepare for a month-long trial against Meta
The jury found Meta and Google negligent and awarded the plaintiff $6 million (Rs 57.12 crores)
Lanier says AI tripled his effective working hours during the trial
In February this year, Texas trial lawyer Mark Lanier woke up after four hours of sleep and got to work preparing to cross-examine one of the world’s wealthiest people. His team had worked through the night, using AI to build the material he would review before heading into court. By the end of the trial, Lanier had helped secure a $6 million (Rs 57.12 crores) verdict against Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta in a landmark social media addiction case and he credits AI as a central reason his preparation was effective enough to win.
SurveyLanier, who has built his reputation taking on major corporations, told Business Insider that AI had transformed what was possible with the limited hours available outside the courtroom during the month-long trial. “It’s as 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,” he said. “In the 10 hours I might be working outside of court, I can get 30 hours of work done.”
The AI platform he relied on most heavily was Boodlebox, an edtech tool that gives users access to multiple major models, including ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, within a shared collaborative workspace. Lanier described it as “Disney World compared to a swing set in the backyard” relative to other AI tools he had tried and arranged a custom licence with the company for a six-figure annual fee. He and his team spent thousands of hours on the platform across the case.
He used AI in several concrete ways: feeding daily court transcripts to models and asking them to evaluate how the proceedings had gone, identifying the most critical supporting documents for specific arguments, finding more vivid or effective ways to describe things before a jury and even analysing jury notes during deliberations to gauge where the panel stood in its thinking. At the end of each day, his team would debrief in what he called a war room, assign tasks, complete them in Boodlebox and prepare material for him to review.
Lanier is careful, however, about what he asks AI to do. “I’m not going to say, ‘Go do my research and write my brief,'” he said. He described catching at least one instance where AI incorrectly cited something from the court record. “It’s not unbridled. You are an important part of the equation,” he said.
What the case was about
The trial centred on the plaintiff, identified only by initials as K.G.M., who started using Instagram at the age of nine. The lawsuit alleged that Meta and Google’s platforms function in an addictive manner that caused harm to young users. The jury found both companies negligent, ruling they knew their platforms were dangerous but failed to warn users.
The case is a guide for thousands of similar lawsuits currently working through US courts, brought by families, state prosecutors and school districts. TikTok and Snapchat settled before trial began and terms were not disclosed.
During the trial, Lanier cross-examined Zuckerberg directly, confronting him with internal Meta emails and research documents that discussed teen usage, engagement targets and awareness of problematic use patterns. Zuckerberg maintained that lawyers were misrepresenting the communications.
