Opinion ID: 27583
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Fraud and Negligent Misrepresentation Claims.

Text: 27 Generally, under Texas law, a plaintiff may not recover in tort for claims arising out of an unenforceable contract under the statute of frauds. Haase, 62 S.W.3d at 799. To the extent, however, that a plaintiff's fraud claim seeks out-of-pocket damages incurred by relying upon a defendant's misrepresentations, those damages are not part of the benefit of any bargain between the parties. They therefore might be recoverable without contravening the statute of frauds. Id. at 799-800. 28 Hugh Symons asserts that it (or Concept) spent $2.5 million based on Motorola's allegedly negligent misrepresentation of its microchip's performance and fraudulent promises of improvement. It claims that it may recover under Haase, which was decided after the instant lawsuit was litigated. We need not determine whether that is true because Hugh Symons has produced no competent evidence of its expenditures. 29 In response to Motorola's Interrogatory Number Five, which required Hugh Symons to state the full amount of money you seek and describe the manner in which the amount was calculated, Hugh Symons reported that it was seeking $2.5 million (converted from £1,554,000 at the rate of £1 = $1.6143) for Components and Sundry Production costs ... Employment Costs ... General Overheads ... Depreciation of Fixed Assets ... Finance Charges ... [and] Group Facilities[] — Office Rental, HR, MIS, etc. It asserts that the respective figures were extracted from its accounts after an audit, but has produced no verification of its interrogatory response or any document whatsoever supporting its expenditure claim. At oral argument, counsel for Hugh Symons admitted that the figure of $2.5 million remained unverified. 30 We might be concerned that Hugh Symons had not been on sufficient notice that it needed to verify its response if Motorola's motion for summary judgment was based on an issue of law. A review of the filings in the trial court, however, reveals that Motorola included the entire interrogatory package, with Hugh Symons's responses, as attachments to two of the three motions for summary judgment, 2 challenging certain of Hugh Symons's assertions. Most notably, however, in Hugh Symons's response on the fraud, negligent misrepresentation, and DTPA claims, it specifically claimed that it had expended at least two and one half million dollars in development of hardware and software and that [t]he damages sought by [Hugh Symons] are the two and one half million dollars spent developing the software and hardware for a wireless device that never worked because the MPC 821 never performed as Motorola said it would. It is clear that Hugh Symons was responding to Motorola's challenge to its claims of fact and had sufficient notice that it needed to verify or substantiate its otherwise-unsupported allegation of expenditure. It failed to do so. Again, an unsubstantiated assertion is incompetent to defeat a motion for summary judgment. Celotex, 477 U.S. at 324, 106 S.Ct. 2548; Eason, 73 F.3d at 1325; Forsyth, 19 F.3d at 1533. 31