Does your company work with contractors, agencies, or vendors who have access to vital, confidential information related to your business?
You need to ensure your information remains confidential. This can be easily done by establishing a non-disclosure agreement, or an NDA.
What Are NDAs?
Non-disclosure agreements are legally enforceable contracts between two parties that create a confidential relationship. It prevents one – or both – parties from disclosing confidential information to others outside of the agreement. This is crucial to protect your company’s information from your competitors.
NDAs are typically created with employees, clients, business affiliates, and third-party vendors. If you’re working with a business affiliate, the NDA may be bilateral, meaning both parties are sharing private information and both are prevented from disclosing it to others. If you are working with a vendor, you might enter into a unilateral NDA, meaning that the obligations only apply to the vendor, as you are the only one disclosing information.
What’s Included in an NDA?
NDAs can include a variety of information. Some of the most common elements found in an agreement are:
- Names of the parties entering into the agreement
- The business purpose of the agreement
- Definition of confidential information
- How the confidential information can be used
- The agreement’s terms
- What the parties need to do with the information – including how it should be stored and how it should be disposed of
Why NDAs Are Important
NDAs are essential to protect your business’s ideas and information. Some reasons you need to establish one with another party include:
Protect Confidential Information: NDAs protect sensitive and confidential information that may be shared with employees, contractors, vendors, or any other parties. This can include intellectual property, data, trade secrets, and more. An NDA protects your information from being shared.
Get a Competitive Advantage: If you’ve invested time and money to get a competitive edge over your competitors with research and innovation, you want to maintain and protect that. NDAs ensure that competitors or unauthorized individuals do not gain access to it.
Secure Business Relationships: If you are working with another business on a project or initiative, you want to ensure any confidential information shared is protected. This enables you and other companies to have open discussions and share information.
Gain Customer Trust: NDAs will help your customers trust your company by ensuring their information is kept private and confidential. This is essential for businesses in the financial and healthcare industries, where customers rely on their information being kept private.
Facilitating Mergers and Acquisitions: If your business is merging with another business or acquiring a company, an NDA is often used to make a safe transfer of sensitive financial and operational information.
Legal Recourse: If an employee, third-party vendor, contractor, or another group commits a breach of confidentiality, having an NDA in place will provide a legal means to take action. You can seek recourse if the other party violated the terms and conditions of the NDA.
Why Hire Us
You need to protect your company’s private information, ideas, financial information, and other resources. Protect it through a non-disclosure agreement with your employees, contractors, vendors, and others you do business with. Let our corporate attorneys at Johnstone Adams LLC help you protect your intellectual property and other confidential information.
Ranked in the 2023 U.S. News – Best Lawyers® “Best Law Firms” list regionally in 12 practice areas, we have experts in many areas of law to give our clients top-notch representation. In business for more than a century, our firm can mix its experience with the ability to evolve with the changing times.
To get started, contact us at 251-319-4659 or info@johnstoneadams.com.