04/01/2026
Congrats to our colleagues at the Lanier Firm.
Attorney Mark Lanier moonlights as a preacher, and it shows when he is taking on the world’s most powerful companies.
The 65-year-old came to court in downtown Los Angeles for closing arguments this month in one of the biggest trials of his career, armed with a parable of leavened bread. He knew he needed a simple way to show a jury that Meta’s Instagram and Google’s YouTube were designed to be addictive and were harmful to young people.
So the veteran plaintiff’s lawyer from Texas showed them two grocery items: cupcakes and tortillas. Social media, he told the courtroom, was like the baking powder that makes a cake rise, exacerbating the struggles of already vulnerable teens.
“We have an interactor, an amplifier—something that blows it up,” Lanier said. “We have here social media that takes the vulnerable and goes after them in destructive ways. It’s as easy as ABC.”
The simple image, delivered with Lanier’s slight drawl, helped convince a majority of jurors. On Wednesday, the ninth day of deliberation, the jury found that Meta and YouTube were negligent in a case that accused the companies of designing their apps to be addictive and harmful to teens.
A Christian who teaches Bible study classes to as many as 500 people at an evangelical church, Lanier leans into a folksy courtroom demeanor honed over decades of trial work, first in Texas and now nationally.
🔗 Read more: https://on.wsj.com/4tcRsXr