One morning in February, Mark Lanier woke up from four hours of sleep and began preparing to cross-examine Mark Zuckerberg, one of the world’s richest people.
His team worked through the night to prepare the day’s materials and review them in the hours before court, all with the help of AI.
Mr. Lanier is a nationally known Texas trial lawyer with a reputation for taking on large corporations in high-stakes cases and previously represented plaintiffs in landmark social media addiction cases. He said AI allowed his team to do significantly more in the limited time they had to prepare outside the courtroom during the trial, which lasted more than a month.
“It’s like having 10 more workers who are incredibly well-trained and know their files inside and out, working 24 hours a day and never having to take PTO or even a bathroom break,” he told Business Insider.
AI in the legal field is being touted as both a huge opportunity and a cautionary tale, with stories of hallucinations and fake citations aplenty. As the legal industry grapples with how to leverage AI, Lanier said it has been a “complete transformation” for him.
Mr. Lanier won his case against Meta and Google, with a jury finding the companies were negligent and awarding the plaintiffs $6 million in damages, saying they knew their platforms were “dangerous” but failed to warn the plaintiffs. The lawsuit was a precursor to thousands of similar lawsuits filed against social media companies.
Mark Lanier said the use of AI has changed the workflow before and during trial. Courtesy of Mark Lanier
Lanier said that while he used some of the most popular AI products, his go-to AI tool before and during the trial was Boodlebox, which he called “Disney World when you compare it to a backyard swing.”
A leader in educational technology, Boodlebox provides access to leading models such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, allowing users to switch between them and compare results. It also supports collaboration, allowing Lanier and his team of lawyers to work alongside AI in the same digital workspace.
Lanier worked with Boodlebox to create a custom license tailored to his needs, which costs six figures a year.
“Essentially, I can take my brain, take my 42 years of experience, take what I learned, researched, published and didn’t publish, and put it into the brain that drove my AI queries and results,” he said.
He relied on AI before and during his landmark trial
Lanier is cautious when talking specifically about how AI will be implemented. It’s a matter of “trade craft,” he says, and his company “does some things that no one else is doing.”
One example he gave included taking records from the courtroom every day and asking different models to evaluate them. He said AI is also perfect for finding more creative or intuitive ways to explain something in court. He even asked the AI to input juror notes from deliberations to assess where jurors were in the process.
At the end of each day in court, they gathered in his war room to debrief and assigned everyone a task, such as pulling out the five most important documents that supported Point A. The team then took a break and did much of that work in Boodlebox so he could review what he put together and how. He said he and his team, which includes several of his daughters, have spent thousands of hours on the platform.
Most of Boodlebox’s customers are major universities, but a Boodlebox representative told Business Insider that the platform is considering more corporate and legal adoption thanks to its collaboration with Lanier.
Lanier said he is not using AI in a way that would get people into trouble. “We don’t say, ‘Look it up and write a brief,'” he said, adding that there was one instance where the AI quoted something from the record and the AI knew it wasn’t correct.
“It’s not unlimited,” he said. “You are an important part of the equation.”
His advice to other lawyers looking to use AI was to stay abreast of developments in a rapidly evolving field. His company has an AI team that sends out a document (usually three single-spaced pages) every Friday with all its AI developments.
“In the next trial, we’re going to do what we did in the last trial and make it look like Fred Flintstone and the Stone Age,” he said.