NDA and Confidentiality agreements
Protecting business information and ideas is absolutely essential to ensuring competitiveness in the modern IT and creative sector and NDA (non-disclosure agreement) and confidentiality agreements are key to this process. Unfortunately, many businesses, particularly small businesses, often operate on trust, as it feels a little too formal to try and introduce the restrictions of this type of agreement into a fairly informal work setting. However, the consequences of not using these types of confidentiality agreements are that essential elements of the business, ground breaking innovations, and crucial business secrets can end up being sold or passed on, considerably reducing competitive advantage.
What should an NDA contain?
NDA and Confidentiality agreements should contain a number of basic clauses that provide protection for your business. These include an outline of what material, knowledge or information is confidential, what the non-disclosure period is, whether there are any exclusions, what disclosure is permitted, the term for which the agreement is binding and whether the agreement is unilateral (the confidential information is only being disclosed by one party) or bilateral (both parties are disclosure confidential information).
Sometimes confidentiality or non-disclosure agreements may be included in another type of agreement. For example, you probably need to include them in most employment contracts and you will certainly need to include one in a Director’s Service Agreement
When could I use an NDA?
For those businesses that don’t use NDA and confidentiality agreements, here are a few situations in which they might come in useful:
- Discussing an invention or the possibility of applying for a patent for something that has been developed within the business. Whether you are talking to an inventor support organisation, a consultant or a patent advisor, it’s advisable to enter into a NDA or confidentiality agreement with them beforehand.
- Working with freelancers or consultants who are not employees of your company – to protect your business’ ideas and innovations you must ensure agreements are signed before any confidential information is handed over.
- When choosing a provider, manufacturer or even a financial backer for your business, protecting its confidential information via an agreement is essential.
Our shop has template agreements available. They are affordable, practical and easy to use because they come with video guide which takes you through each section of the document. You can use them confidently because they are written by qualified and experienced lawyers. Choose from:
An NDA with another business (for example, this would be ideal for confidential discussion before you do business together) or
An NDA with an individual (ideal if you are interviewing to hire a freelancer who is a sole trader or a new employee).
NDA TRAINING
If you need to know more about confidentiality and non disclosure and need to use agreements with both businesses and individual then please visit our NDA training.
Law Hound also offers tailored services for IT and creative sector businesses looking to protect their confidentiality. Our packages are fixed price and provide all essential advice and support, without any unnecessary extra costs.