Mark Lanier has a gift for quickly expressing the essence of things. Ask him why he became a lawyer — more specifically, a litigator — and his answer is commendably plainspoken. “I like to talk, and I like to argue,” he says with a smile.

Recent events have proven just how persuasive Lanier’s oral arguments can be. Backed by his tightly knit five-person litigation team, Lanier recently won two headline-making cases against pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co., resulting in the award of over $250 million in judgments to clients who’d used the painkiller Vioxx.

“Merck has done much to further world health,” says Lanier. “But when our clients came to us, we realized we’d isolated a potentially problematic area within the company. Things got out of hand in one department, and as a result, we believe our clients were harmed. It was an honor and a challenge to use our court system to see if we were right.”

Mac to the Rescue

Remarkably, the small, Houston-based Lanier Law Firm emerged victorious against a corporation that had bankrolled close to a billion dollars to defend Vioxx lawsuits, and employed an army of top-shelf firms with thousands of attorneys in their ranks.

His firm’s invaluable partner in that David-versus-Goliath confrontation? “Our Mac computers,” says Lanier. “The moment we started using Mac was truly a pivotal point in the litigation process. It literally revolutionized the way we did presentations at trial.”

Like so many people these days, Mac technology entered Lanier’s professional life via his personal life. “I got my first Mac for two very simple reasons. First, I noticed that my son’s Mac never crashed, whereas crashing was a daily affair for the PCs I’d been using. Second, I was really jazzed when the iPod came out, and when my son showed me how blissfully simple the iTunes interface was — and that it was typical of most Mac software — I was sold.”

Making More Powerful Points

Lanier soon began showing up at the office with a Mac laptop — and Rich Martinez, his IT Director, suggested he try PowerPoint on the Mac to craft visual presentations for his arguments. “I’d been using PowerPoint on PCs for years,” remembers Lanier. “But when I installed the Mac version on my PowerBook, it was an incredible thing. The program just flowed so much better; it was easier to work with, easier to write with, easier to think with. And since that very first time, I’ve never gone back. PowerPoint on the Mac is much more user-friendly, and a clear technological leap forward.