Texas Judge Turns Away 'Fraud' Claim, Affirms $740M Trade Secret Judgment
Susman Godfrey says real estate appraiser Amrock "cannot distract from the fact that it stole HouseCanary's proprietary technology."
January 11, 2019 at 04:32 PM
2 minute read
Susman Godfrey's $740 million trade secret judgment for online real estate appraiser HouseCanary has withstood a post-trial attack from competitor Amrock and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.
San Francisco startup HouseCanary persuaded a Bexar County jury last March that Amrock, a Quicken Loans affiliate previously known as Title Source, struck a licensing deal with HouseCanary and then used it as subterfuge to reverse-engineer its own competing valuation model.
Afterward, Amrock claimed to have located former employees and competitors of HouseCanary who would blow the whistle on HouseCanary's trial narrative. Gibson Dunn partner Randy Mastro called the verdict “one of the most egregious frauds that I have ever seen in my 35-year career as a litigator and former federal prosecutor.”
But after hearing from four witnesses over four days of hearings in the last month, Judge David Canales rejected Amrock's new trial motion.
“This was precisely the right decision,” Susman Godfrey partner Kalpana Srinivasan said in a statement. Amrock produced no new information, but rather “used the court's time to parade out so-called 'whistleblowers'” who were trying to advance their own business interests with Amrock and Quicken, she noted.
“Amrock cannot distract from the fact that it stole HouseCanary's proprietary technology,” said Susman Godfrey partner Max Tribble, who tried the case with Srinivasan and Ricardo Cedillo of Davis, Cedillo & Mendoza. “The jury saw all of the facts and rendered a careful verdict after a seven-week trial, and the attempts by Amrock to nullify the jury's decision were entirely dismissed by the Court after another four days of hearings.”
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