You have a great business idea. It is so great that you are sure that it will make you rich overnight, Forbes will want to place you on the cover of next month’s edition, and you will be known as the next culinary genius or tech billionaire. Well, maybe your idea isn’t that grand, but you still realize that you have an opportunity to make a decent living based on your newly discovered product.
The problem is that now that you have pored over the idea alone in your home office, you must find the a company to source your product, distribute it, market it, and maybe work as an employee for you once the item is sold at retail. This means that along the way of taking your model good from the boardroom to the production lines that you must grant others access to proprietary information that may be copied or sold to other companies by third parties.
Non-disclosure agreements seek to prevent disclosure and usage of proprietary information while providing a form of redress in the way of an injunction if the terms of the agreement are violated. This is very often the first contractual form that a business/individual should have a lawyer create when dealing with third parties. It can save a business owner considerable grief in the future and assist in the successful promotion of the company’s product.