Hard feelings could split software maker.

• Author: Richter, Chris
• Position: TAR HEEL TATTLER

It's the classic love pentagon--man, woman, their company, another woman and her husband. A year after Jill and Clark Maurer divorced, she says, he helped the other woman take her job. Not only that, she claims, the other couple all along only had eyes for SlickEdit Inc., a Morrisville-based software company that the Maurers started during happier times.

She is suing to get her job back and recover payments she says the company owes her. That or to force the sale of SlickEdit so she can collect her share of the proceeds.

The Maurers started the company, which makes editing software for computer programmers, in Fairfax, Va., in 1988. They moved to the Triangle in 1990. She was CEO, and he was chief technology officer. By 1998, they wanted to sell. Their target price: $25 million to $30 million. SlickEdit recruited Andre Boisvert to its board in 2000, the suit says, to help position it for sale. Boisvert was vice president for business development and strategic investments at SAS Institute, a Cary-based software developer. He was appointed president and chief operating officer of SAS later that year and was grooming it for an initial public offering that didn't happen.

The suit says that he did nothing to position SlickEdit for a sale. Instead, he boosted his stake in the company to 11% and got his wife, Erica, a job as...