A Bexar County jury has handed San Antonio-based HouseCanary Inc. a $175 million victory, finding that title-services company Amrock misappropriated trade secrets tied to HouseCanary’s home-valuation models. After nearly four weeks of testimony, the 12-person panel needed only about three hours of deliberations to reach its decision.
Jurors sided with HouseCanary on claims that Amrock used proprietary valuation models and data, awarding $175 million in compensatory damages. They initially also checked boxes for $201.6 million in punitive damages, a number that briefly flashed across the verdict form before the judge literally “whited out” those answers when one juror dissented on unanimity. HouseCanary’s attorneys said the compensatory award plus prejudgment interest will likely push the total recovery past $260 million, and they briefly celebrated in the courtroom after the verdict was read. As reported by the San Antonio Express-News, jurors deliberated just under three hours following the weeks-long trial.
How the Case Returned to Court
The fight dates back to contracts signed in 2013 and a 2018 trial that produced a roughly $706 million jury award for HouseCanary, a blockbuster result that did not survive appellate review. The Fourth Court of Appeals later reversed that outcome after finding problems with the jury instructions and mixed liability theories. Legal analysis on JD Supra walks through why the appeals court sent some claims back for a new trial, and contemporaneous coverage summarized the 2018 findings and docket details in a Law360 summary made public by counsel. The appellate focus on how the jury was charged and what theories it could rely on is what brought the case back in front of a new Bexar County jury this year.
Judge Erases Punitive Award
Late in the day, State District Judge Rosie Alvarado polled the jurors and discovered they were not unanimous on the punitive-damages question, a problem under Texas law. She then corrected the verdict form by literally erasing the punitive-damage entries. "This is the biggest amount that I think I've ever erased," she said, prompting HouseCanary lawyer Max Tribble to toss off a one-word response that drew a tight courtroom laugh: "Rats." The clean-up narrowed what the jury actually awarded and all but guaranteed another round of appellate briefing.
What Comes Next
Amrock has already signaled it is not treating the $175 million verdict as the final word. The company said it will "aggressively challenge" the result and is "confident it will be overturned once again," according to the San Antonio Express-News. Amrock now operates under the name Rocket Close, a unit of Rocket Companies, according to the parent’s recent Form 10-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Any appeal is expected to revisit familiar battlegrounds: how the jury was instructed, what counts as a protectable trade secret in this context, and how damages should be calculated in a complex tech-and-data dispute that has already split judges and juries once before.
Legal Context
Under Texas law, a jury must be unanimous before it can award exemplary (punitive) damages, and that unanimity rule is a big reason punitive numbers can vanish or be reexamined after a verdict; see Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code §41.003. Layer that onto the Fourth Court of Appeals’ earlier criticism of the jury charge in this very case, and the road ahead is likely to turn on technical but pivotal questions about how jurors were instructed and which pieces of HouseCanary’s technology and data legally qualify as trade secrets.
.jpg){kind=link}