Mr. W. Mark Lanier

Over more than 35 years, Mark has taken on some of the most difficult legal challenges and won some of the largest verdicts in U.S. history. His cases have confronted the harm caused by mesothelioma and asbestos exposure, dangerous drugs, defective medical devices, addictive social media, and other dangerous consumer products and services. His work has helped to protect the public and has led to changes in how companies conduct themselves. He’s also prevailed in significant and important business disputes involving fraud, breach of contract, and other commercial matters. Cumulatively, his trial work now exceeds $20 billion in verdicts.

What sets Mark apart is not only the size of the verdicts and settlements but also how he reaches them. He takes his clients’ story and makes a jury feel its weight, then uses that verdict to achieve appropriate justice. He prepares exhaustively and adopts new tools when they help, including artificial intelligence, yet he still tries every case the way he always has, by telling the truth plainly and trusting a jury to do what is right.

Mark is also widely regarded as one of the most persuasive courtroom advocates of his generation, known for distilling complex scientific and technical cases into clear, compelling narratives that resonate with juries. Speaking in plain language and without notes, he builds each case around a simple theme and reinforces it with vivid demonstratives, examples and props taken from everyday life, and carefully designed visual presentations that make difficult evidence easy for jurors to follow and understand. He shares this unique talent widely. Mark headlines his own Lanier Trial Academy each summer for more than 1,000 plaintiffs’ lawyers, and in 2025 he delivered the inaugural lecture in Case Western Reserve University School of Law’s Anatomy of a Trial series on trial strategy, persuasion, and storytelling.

Most recently, Mark led a trial team that secured a jury verdict totaling $6 million in compensatory and punitive damages for an individual plaintiff against Meta and Google’s YouTube in a landmark trial on the role of addictive social media platform features in harming mental health.

Mark has also become a prominent voice on the use of artificial intelligence in trial practice. In the social media addiction trial, he drew on a collaborative AI platform that integrates multiple large language models to help build and pressure-test his case strategy, an approach that drew wide attention in the legal and technology press. He also teaches the practical and ethical use of AI in litigation, from case development through trial, as part of the Lanier Trial Academy curriculum.

Mark’s success in the courtroom and perspectives on litigation have been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, Bloomberg News, and the Houston Chronicle, among many other publications. He is also a frequent guest on news and business programs for a wide range of broadcast and cable networks, including CNBC, Fox News, CNN and Fox Business.

A devout Christian, Mark is also the founder of the Lanier Theological Library, one of the nation’s largest private theological collections. He teaches a weekly, 750-plus-member Sunday school class focusing on Biblical literacy at Champion Forest Baptist Church in Houston. He is a prolific author as well. His works examining faith include Christianity on Trial (IVP, 2014), Atheism on Trial (IVP, 2022), and Religions on Trial (IVP, 2023), along with a series of daily devotionals from Baylor University Press: Psalms for Living (2016), which received the 2018 Illumination Book Award in the Devotional category, Torah for Living (2018), Minor Prophets for Living (2024), and New Testament Letters for Living (2024). He has also authored the legal practice text Lanier’s Texas Personal Injury Forms.

Mark considers his greatest achievement to be his family. He is the father of five wonderful children and lives in Houston with his wife, Becky.

(Board Certified, Personal Injury Trial Law, Texas Board of Legal Specialization) (Also Of Counsel to Michael B. Serling, P.C., Birmingham, Michigan)