Had to pick between a boilerplate NDA and paying a lawyer $400 to draft one for a single project handshake deal

I went with the boilerplate off a legal template site because the other guy seemed trustworthy and it was a small local project. Three months later he was shopping my process around to a competitor, and the NDA was too generic to enforce anything. Anybody have luck with free templates holding up in a real dispute?

3 comments

3 Comments

webb.hannah22d ago

That sounds like a tough lesson learned. When you say the NDA was too generic to enforce, was there a specific clause missing, like a definition of what constitutes your "process" versus general industry knowledge?

troyc1722d ago

A buddy of mine signed one without a "process" definition and got burned when his code turned up on GitHub.

corap6120d ago

Focus on the surveillance part most people miss. NDAs aren't just about what you keep secret, they're about who gets watched. If the NDA is vague on what counts as confidential, the company can monitor anything you do and claim it's related to their business. That opens the door to tracking your personal projects, your side work, even your conversations at industry events. Then if they find something they don't like, they use that fuzzy NDA to say you breached it. It becomes a tool for control, not just protection.