Thoughts on nondisclosure agreements - Go Mutual

In my experience nondisclosure agreements (NDA) are pretty one-sided and often require the consultant to return all confidential information including all copies, summaries, and notes pertaining to said "Confidential Information." This may not sound like a big deal until you think of the position this puts you in if some nasty disagreement comes up and lawyers start mucking things up encouraging people to answer questions with silly responses such as, "I can neither confirm, nor deny..."

At that point it might be a good idea to at least have one copy of the work you wrote about said "Confidential Information" to protect yourself from out and out lies. I have found that mutual NDAs are much more balanced because the client will have to abide by the same rules as the consultant. All of the mutual NDAs I have seen allow both parties to keep one copy of the "Confidential Information" and all notes pertaining to such information. Now I routinely ask a mutual NDA. Recently I was asked what information I would be sharing that would be confidential and I bit my tongue and answered that I wouldn’t know until we were in the middle of the job and that it would be best to have everything in place so I could share freely with the client at that point. What I wanted to say was, “Barring a signed agreement, if I tell you the information that is confidential, then I’ll have to kill you.”