A Confidentiality Contract can be used to protect your new business ideas when hiring employees, contracting specialists, discussing finance, outsourcing, etc. Using a Confidentiality Agreement can be vital in protecting a new business in its early and most vulnerable stages.
In starting your new business, you may need to speak to financiers, or engage someone to help you start your business idea such as designers, or technology contractors. In this case, it would be wise and highly recommended to ensure your business idea is protected so that it is not copied, stolen or leaked to the public by having anyone you speak to, sign a confidentiality contract before you speak or provide any information to them. In this manner, you will protect yourself and your business idea against anyone disclosing or copying your idea and can sue them for any loss or damage suffered as a result of any breach of confidentiality.
Don’t forget Confidentiality Contracts for your employees …
In addition, you may wish to require your new employees to sign an agreement to ensure your ideas and processes are not disclosed or copied and that client or customer information is kept confidential. By having a confidentiality agreement in place, it may give an employer peace of mind that the employee knows the significance of the information they are gaining and to give the employer a right recourse if information is disseminated and loss or damage is suffered.
In many instances, it may be natural for an employer to feel apprehensive about disclosing certain information to employees. By having an employee sign a confidentiality contract, the employer has outlined to the employee the nature in which the information has or may be communicated to them and has highlighted the liability and repercussions that will occur if they disclose this type of information.
On larger scale, confidentiality agreements may be used by companies in instances where they may have to divulge important market information to other organisations throughout the course of doing business. For example, this occurs quite often in the course of marketing, where an organisation may disclose valuable research or a new product to marketing company to engage the marketing company for advertising purposes. The company engaging the marketing company would not want this information disseminated to the public before a certain date, particularly to its competitors and would want to ensure it is protected through signing a confidentiality agreement.
The range of information that can be protected and the type of information that can be protected is broad. You can tailor a confidentiality agreement to cover many varied types of information for your business which can range from protecting medical and cosmetic treatments, to client and patient information, to recipes for things you may be selling or designs you may have created.
Whatever your business, there is always some type of information that needs to be protected.
We’ve written an extremely easy-to-use Confidentiality Agreement. It uses plain English with no legal jargon and comes in 3 formats: email, letter and full agreement:
