Patent Law

In a follow-up to my December 20, 2007 post titled, "Accenture Files Patent Suit Against Guidewire," I was contacted this afternoon by a representative of Guidewire.  She said that Guidewire has launched a website titled, "Accenture Behaving Badly."

Some excerpts from this new site, which include the quote from John DelSanto, a partner at Accenture, cited in my original post:

Guidewire has never misappropriated Accenture's trade secrets and has not infringed Accenture's patent.

Guidewire believes both of these claims were filed in bad faith. Guidewire's February 6, 2008 filing makes clear that Accenture knew their claims were objectively meritless and asserted the claims anyway because of their inability to compete with Guidewire in the free market.

The trade secret claim does not specify what secrets were appropriated, how they were appropriated, how Guidewire used them, how Guidewire's product even resembles Accenture's product ... or any facts whatsoever, except Guidewire's "surprisingly quick development trajectory."

"Guidewire uses innovative software development techniques such as Agile and ?test-first? that enable complex solutions to be built faster and with higher quality than traditional development methods." - John Seybold, CTO and Co-founder, Guidewire

The Guidewire representative also indicated that there will be new activity on the legal case towards the end of this month.  See Accenture Behaving Badly.