The Right Way to Look at NDAs

For most businesses, NDAs are – and should be – a tick box exercise.

There are exceptions if you are sharing information which is ultra-sensitive (e.g. the recipe to Coca-Cola) but for most businesses the key issue is whether or not the company you are sharing confidential information with is trustworthy given:

a) the sensitivity (to you) of the information you are sharing, and

b) the potential upside resulting from the sharing.

That’s because an NDA itself is very hard to enforce.

To begin, if your confidential information has been misused, you have to find out about the misuse before you can take any action. The chances of finding out at all, let alone in a reasonable time, are slim.

The second issue is that any legal action is likely to be expensive, difficult and take considerable time before it reaches a conclusion.

But there’s also a more positive way to look at it.

How many times have you heard of another business acting in breach of an NDA? If you add your experience together with friends and colleagues from other businesses, I would be surprised if NDA breach issues arise more often than once every 500 years of person experience.

In other words, most businesses are trustworthy and would still be trustworthy even if they didn’t sign an NDA.

This doesn’t mean that you should ignore NDAs. It just means that you shouldn’t devote too much time to them.

When reviewing an NDA, don’t insist on perfection. Close enough is good enough.

28th October 2025