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NDA. I have a meeting this week with company A - the president of which has signed a NDA for me. The president wishes to bring a contractor to the meeting because the contractor has some experience in the area. The president tells me the contractor would be covered under the NDA between his company and the contractor. Should I trust this? Should I request a copy of the Company/Contractor NDA for my records? Should I ask the Contractor to sign a separate NDA?
Does anyone here know how NDA's propagate? Yes, I will research this outside of CD. But I am looking for a hint of a direction on the web I can research.
Edit:
From what I read, a Multilateral NDA sounds like what I need. But since the company has already signed an Unilateral NDA, I would think I just need the third party contractor to also sign a Unilateral.
You are a little vague about who is requesting protection from whom. If you are seeking to have your work product protected from misuse by others, you need your own NDA and you request that others sign it before meeting with you. Your NDA would state who and what is covered, for instance, sub-contractors hired by the counter-party (in this case, company A).
If you have signed someone else's NDA, it may or may not protect you and your intellectual property, but I would assume it does not. After all, the primary concern of the counter party will be himself and his company, not you.
NDA's are all different and it is not really possible to say how one will "propagate". You need to have your own so you can control what it covers, which you can specify.
I used to sign and invoke NDA's often in what we did. We carefully scrutinized an NDA that another company asked us to sign and sometimes would refuse to sign another party's NDA and request that they sign ours instead. We had both one-way and mutual NDA's, depending on the situation.
Edit: the contractor you mentioned may or may not be enjoined by your NDA. It will depend on the wording of the NDA and the status of the contractor. Is he/she under contract to company A? Or is the contractor just at the meeting as an invitee? The two are quite different.
You are a little vague about who is requesting protection from whom. If you are seeking to have your work product protected from misuse by others, you need your own NDA and you request that others sign it before meeting with you. Your NDA would state who and what is covered, for instance, sub-contractors hired by the counter-party (in this case, company A).
If you have signed someone else's NDA, it may or may not protect you and your intellectual property, but I would assume it does not. After all, the primary concern of the counter party will be himself and his company, not you.
NDA's are all different and it is not really possible to say how one will "propagate". You need to have your own so you can control what it covers, which you can specify.
I used to sign and invoke NDA's often in what we did. We carefully scrutinized an NDA that another company asked us to sign and sometimes would refuse to sign another party's NDA and request that they sign ours instead. We had both one-way and mutual NDA's, depending on the situation.
Edit: the contractor you mentioned may or may not be enjoined by your NDA. It will depend on the wording of the NDA and the status of the contractor. Is he/she under contract to company A? Or is the contractor just at the meeting as an invitee? The two are quite different.
The NDA is to protect my work (invention). The company I am considering hiring has signed it.
The contractor is a sub to the company I am considering to do work for me.
The company has said that they have a NDA with the sub and that that NDA will protect me... This is not what I am sure of.
When I created the original NDA and had the company sign it, I did not anticipate the company bringing anyone into the meeting.
I will modify my NDA so that in the future it will include all contractors and subs to the signing company. Question/Problem with this is... If I get a company to sign an NDA and within that document it says that all their employees/subs are bound by this... ...yet, the subs never signed such a document with the company, then I see no path to enforcing the NDA between me and the sub. Seems to me, I need a separate NDA to all the individual companies I meet with instead of taking the word of the company that they have an agreement with the sub.
I have asked the company to give me a copy of the NDA they have between themselves and the contractor. I have not heard back yet.
I think at this point I will take a blank NDA to the meeting with me and ask the contractor to sign.
Last edited by blktoptrvl; 07-25-2016 at 11:12 AM..
I will modify my NDA so that in the future it will include all contractors and subs to the signing company. Question/Problem with this is... If I get a company to sign an NDA and within that document it says that all their employees/subs are bound by this... ...yet, the subs never signed such a document with the company, then I see no path to enforcing the NDA between me and the sub. Seems to me, I need a separate NDA to all the individual companies I meet with instead of taking the word of the company that they have an agreement with the sub.
I think at this point I will take a blank NDA to the meeting with me and ask the contractor to sign.
Once the company signs that, it is incumbent upon them to make sure their employees and subs are maintaining contractual obligations on behalf of the company. You do not need to go to each individual attending the meeting, provided the NDA the company signed is clear that it covers the company and all its employees and subs.
You should probably get a lawyer to draw up a good NDA for you and verify these points.
Once the company signs that, it is incumbent upon them to make sure their employees and subs are maintaining contractual obligations on behalf of the company. You do not need to go to each individual attending the meeting, provided the NDA the company signed is clear that it covers the company and all its employees and subs.
You should probably get a lawyer to draw up a good NDA for you and verify these points.
Get a lawyer involved. My dad is a general contractor and he has had to sign NDAs working for various companies and government agencies. If he uses sub contractors they have to sign the same agreement. I'm not a lawyer, but from my experiences all companies involved have to sign a NDA. There were probably 60 employees working for, I believe 4 different companies and we all had to sit through a meeting and go over the NDA. Everyone had to sign some papers, but I don't think we all had to sign NDAs, but we may have. We were remodeling at a secure research institute at a university.
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