A Texas trial lawyer says AI was his secret weapon during the five-week case that ended with a $6 million verdict against Meta and Google.
Mark Lanier, known for high-stakes litigation against large defendants, won a social media addiction case in March. He told Business Insider that AI let him compress roughly 30 hours of preparation into 10 throughout the trial — a three-to-one efficiency ratio sustained over five weeks. The defendants were two of the most legally resourced companies in tech.
The legal profession has been slow to adopt AI, partly because bar rules around competence and confidentiality create genuine friction for practitioners considering it. A plaintiff winning against Meta and Google by using AI to out-prepare them is the kind of case study that will be difficult for cautious firms to dismiss. If smaller practices can close the research gap with Big Tech's legal departments, the calculus on which cases get filed starts to shift.
The irony is tidy: Meta, whose products are accused of algorithmically hooking teenagers, lost to a lawyer who used AI to work like a machine.