British Gas v Accenture: Round one

British Gas is currently seeking to recover around £220 m from Accenture in respect of Accenture's design and build of a new billing system. Two judgments on preliminary issues in the litigation were handed down in November 2009. This article provides the background to the dispute and then examines three areas considered in the judgments which are of general interest to practitioners. First, the article considers the issue of breach and the extent to which aggregation of breaches and a forward looking approach to their consequence may assist in determining their materiality. Secondly, the article considers the nature of notices of breach given under IT contracts. Finally, the article looks at issues of allocation of certain categories of loss to the two different limbs of Hadley v Baxendale, and as a result their potential recoverability.