Reference no: EM131738262

This is about Contact Law not computers.

You are the purchasing agent for a company that just purchased a new accounting and invoicing software system. The vendor's service people have installed the software and have trained your company's people in using the software. The first week the software mistakenly surpluses half of your inventory, sending it to salvage, and also invoices all of your customers at 1/100 the actual price. The next week, the software sends your best customer an invoice that is 1000 times too high and the customer cancels all contracts and posts an angry comment on your company's blog. Because of the blog post, your company loses a new bid for $10,000,000 worth of business. By now, you have called in the sales people for the vendor, who say, “Oh, yea. We've had some problems with this software. We thought that had all been fixed.” The next week you learn that the software contained a virus which has infected your entire IT system requiring your IT people to shut down the company for two weeks to clean out every computer.

So you take the vendor to court; during discovery you find an email from the vendor's Vice President of Marketing to the President that says “you know this software is a mess. I'ts going to really screw up the company's invoicing and who knows what else, but that company is too stupid to know what's going on. We can make a mint sending in our service people to straighten it all out.' The President responded “Go for it. We need to make our numbers this quarter.”

So what kind of damages might be appropriate in this case?