One morning in February, Mark Lanier woke up after four hours of sleep and started preparing to cross-examine one of the wealthiest people in the world: Mark Zuckerberg.
His team had worked through the night, preparing material for the day ahead that he could then review in the hours before court, all with the help of AI.
Lanier, a nationally known Texas trial lawyer with a reputation for taking on major corporations in high-stakes trials, was representing the plaintiff in a landmark social media addiction case. He said AI allowed his team to do significantly more with the limited hours they had to prep outside the courtroom during the trial, which lasted over a month.
“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 told Business Insider, adding, “In the 10 hours I might be working outside of court, I can get 30 hours of work done.”
AI in law has been touted both as a major opportunity and a cautionary tale, with many stories of hallucinations and fake citations. While the legal industry grapples with how to use AI, Lanier said it’s been a “total game changer” for him.
Lanier won the case against Meta and Google, in which the jury found the companies negligent and ruled they knew their platforms were “dangerous” but failed to warn the plaintiff, who was awarded $6 million. The case was a bellwether for thousands of similar lawsuits brought against social media companies.
Courtesy of Mark Lanier
While Lanier had used the most popular AI products, he said the AI tool he relied on before and during the trial was Boodlebox, calling it “Disney World compared to a swing set in the backyard.”
A leader in the education technology space, Boodlebox provides access to major models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, allowing users to switch between them or compare results. It’s also collaborative, allowing Lanier and his team of lawyers to 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.
“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,” he said.
He relied on AI before and during the landmark trial
Lanier is careful when talking specifics about how he deploys his AI. He says it’s a matter of “trade craft” and that his firm is “doing some things that nobody else is doing.”
One example he gave included taking transcripts from court each day and asking different models to evaluate them. He said AI is also great for finding a more creative or visceral way to describe something in court. He even would feed AI jury notes that came up during deliberations and ask it to evaluate where the jury was in the process.
At the end of court each day, they’d meet in his war room, debrief, and assign tasks to everyone, such as pulling the five most critical documents supporting point A. The team would then break and do much of that work in Boodlebox, allowing him to review what they’ve put together and how. He said he and his team, which includes several of his daughters, spent thousands of hours on the platform.
While most of Boodlebox’s clients are big universities, a company representative told Business Insider that the platform is also exploring more enterprise and law adoption, in part because of its work with Lanier.
Lanier 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, adding that there was 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 to keep up with the developments in the rapidly evolving field. 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.
