Non disclosure agreements. These are contracts that are signed way too frequently by people who pay way to little attention to what they’re signing. Your confidential and proprietary information, your trade secrets, these are your lifeblood. These are what give you a competitive advantage in a highly competitive world. When disclosing your secrets to another party, your NDA should be taken seriously. It might be the only thing standing between your secrets and wide disclosure to the general public.

All NDAs aren’t equal. Some don’t even protect YOUR disclosures. Some NDAs are already expired before you start disclosing. Some NDAs permit the other party to do whatever they want with your trade secrets after a few years. Some NDAs don’t protect oral disclosures. Simply, when considering a disclosure of your secrets to anyone, you need to not only have an NDA in place, but you need to understand it, and be certain that it protects what you need it to protect.