Source: The Texas Lawyer and Part-Time Pastor Who Beat Meta and Google Publisher: The Wall Street Journal | Author: Laura J. Nelson, Katherine Sayre Published: March 27, 2026 | Archived: March 29, 2026

March 27, 2026 8:00 pm ET

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.

The jury ordered the companies to pay $3 million in compensatory damages and $3 million in punitive damages to the plaintiff, a now-20-year-old woman named Kaley, whose last name was redacted in the case. She had testified that social-media use that started when she was a child dominated her life for years and contributed to mental-health issues including anxiety, depression and body dysmorphia.

In a statement, Meta said it disagrees with the verdict and plans to pursue an appeal: “Reducing something as complex as teen mental health to a single cause risks leaving the many, broader issues teens face today unaddressed.”

A Google spokesman said the company plans to appeal. The case, he said, “misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social-media site.”

Lanier has built a career—and fortune—representing plaintiffs against corporate giants. He won one of the first major wrongful-death trials against pharma company Merck over claims that the prescription anti-inflammatory drug Vioxx caused heart problems. He also won a $4.69 billion verdict in 2018 for women and their families who said asbestos-tainted talcum powder caused ovarian cancer. 

The social-media trial drew more scrutiny than he predicted before he joined the plaintiff’s team last fall and was brought face-to-face with Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg. Suddenly, Lanier was at the epicenter of a broad public debate about social media and how people stay connected—or are disconnected—on platforms offering nearly endless content curated by algorithms.

“Nothing compared to this,” Lanier said, reflecting on the attention to the trial, over oatmeal, toast and a Coke Zero in a downtown Los Angeles hotel the morning after the victory. “Nothing even remotely close.”

Social-media companies have largely been shielded from being held liable for third-party content on their platforms by Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. At trial, Lanier had to focus on the platforms’ features—not the content—to make a case.

The trial was the first among thousands of consolidated lawsuits filed by teenagers, school districts and state attorneys general against Meta, YouTube, TikTok and Snap. More are scheduled for this year. TikTok and Snap settled the first case. 

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. 

He’s known for showing jurors hand-drawn “road maps” and illustrations on an overhead projector to guide them through his legal reasoning and evidence, including sign posts and human figures that could have been sketched by a child.

To visualize microscopic asbestos fibers in talcum powder, he brought a bale of hay into a courtroom and dropped a needle into the blades. 

When arguing for punitive damages against the tech companies, Lanier held up a jar of 415 M&Ms to show how a $1 billion fine would be a fraction of Alphabet’s $415 billion in shareholder equity. 

He says he tries to avoid being flashy himself. He wears the same two unremarkable suits on rotation during a trial, “and then I go burn them.”

Lanier graduated from college at 20 and trained as a minister before going to law school at Texas Tech University, hoping to make enough money to support his preaching. 

He began gaining renown as a lawyer in an era when asbestos cases were swamping the U.S. courts. He won a jury verdict of about $115 million in 1998 for 21 steelworkers who fell ill after using machinery that contained asbestos.

Lanier and his wife, Becky Lanier, met in high-school debate class. They have five children and 12 grandchildren. They were known for years for their child-friendly Christmas parties at their estate of more than 35 acres near Houston, which has a model railroad that can seat 120 people and a menagerie containing lemurs and llamas.

The family pulled the plug on the party, which featured up to 9,000 guests and performers including Miley Cyrus, Johnny Cash and Dolly Parton, he said, because it was too hard on the lawn.

Lanier said the theme of his cases against major corporations is “responsibility and integrity,” or lack of it. Tech billionaires don’t need his help, Lanier said, but “Kaley would not have anybody else. Faith is much the same way. God’s there to try to help people who need the help.” 

Two of Lanier’s daughters, who are lawyers, were by his side during the trial. He joined the social-media case in November after his daughter, Rachel Lanier, asked him to lead the trial.

“He has a deep authenticity that people can feel,” Rachel Lanier said the day after the jury’s verdict. “He’s not phony. What he does is not a performance.”

Even from Los Angeles, he posted short video selfies discussing Bible passages on YouTube.

During the trial, lawyers for Meta tried to convince jurors that Kaley’s struggles weren’t caused by social media but by other factors, including bullying at school and tensions at home. YouTube’s lawyers argued that she didn’t spend enough time on the platform to be addicted.

“Kaley came from a messed up home life,” Lanier said. “She had difficulties already in her life, and there’s no sugar coating that. So we had to navigate this argument that what social-media addiction does is it preys upon the vulnerable more times than not.” 

The morning of Zuckerberg’s testimony, Lanier said he got a text from Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, who had clashed with Zuckerberg during a testy 2024 hearing on Capitol Hill about social-media harms for children. He wished Lanier luck. 

Lanier said he knew Zuckerberg would be “very well-rehearsed.” While questioning the tech billionaire, Lanier said he noticed “something he does when he’s rattled,” and tried to take advantage of it. He declined to share specifics, saying he may question Zuckerberg again in a future case.

The Sunday before the verdict was reached, back home for the weekend, Lanier was on a church stage. The lesson was on Romans, Chapter 8, which he described as “the history of humanity, our relationship with God, our present day life and the future of where we’re headed.”

Deliberations took nine days, the longest Lanier said he had ever waited for a verdict. He woke up before 3 a.m. the day of the verdict and read the 23rd Psalm, translating it from Hebrew, which begins, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.”

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Appeared in the March 28, 2026, print edition as ‘The Lawyer Who Beat Meta and YouTube’.

Laura J. Nelson is an enterprise reporter in The Wall Street Journal’s Los Angeles bureau, focusing on politics, technology and California. She previously was a staff writer at the Los Angeles Times, where she worked for more than 13 years as an enterprise and investigative reporter and as a beat reporter covering transportation and politics. She has profiled Golden State power brokers and scrutinized major public policies and political campaigns, including races for California governor, the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate.

Laura shared in the Pulitzer Prize in breaking news in 2016 for coverage of the San Bernardino terror attack and was part of a team honored as Pulitzer finalists in 2020 for coverage of a deadly diving boat fire off the California coast. Her work has been also recognized by the California Journalism Awards, the Sacramento Press Club and the Best of the West.

Nelson grew up in Kansas and graduated from the University of Southern California. 

Katherine Sayre is an entertainment reporter in The Wall Street Journal’s Los Angeles bureau. She joined the Journal in 2019 to cover the gambling industry, exploring Las Vegas Strip casinos and the rise of sports betting. 

Katherine is co-author with former Journal colleague Kirsten Grind of the book “Happy at Any Cost: The Revolutionary Vision and Fatal Quest of Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh.” 

Before joining the Journal, Katherine was an investigative and business reporter in New Orleans at the Times-Picayune.