On March 15, 2018, HouseCanary, a data-analytics startup, was awarded $706 million in damages by a jury in Texas in its lawsuit against Title Source, an affiliate of Quicken Loans. The jury found Title Source misappropriated trade secrets including HouseCanary’s technology and appraisal analytics and breached both confidentiality and other agreements between the parties. While Title Source engineers were building the automated valuation model (“AVM”), HouseCanary alleged they helped themselves to other intellectual property, algorithms, analytics, and proprietary data without paying for it. In fact, an email from a Title Source employee encouraged colleagues to “think big and wide about how to maximize the value of the HouseCanary data to our business.” The jury found that a combination of lost profits and the benefit that Title Source obtained from the trade secrets misappropriation warranted $235 million in damages but tripled the damages due to a finding of deliberate conduct resulting in a final damages award to over $700 million. A big number indeed.
