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joetheone | 5 years ago
If you're talking about the NDA process between vendors and assessors, that is a whole different can of worms which we have not really waded into at this point.
In my experience as a startup founder, the easiest way to handle these types of situations is to just read over and sign whatever NDA the bigger company has sent over.
dctoedt|5 years ago
That can cause problems down the road for a receiving party. For example:
1. Some NDAs include terms that assign ownership of newly-developed IP to the big company — this once resulted in Stanford University losing part-ownership of one of its biotech patents to Roche, in a case that Stanford (unsuccessfully) took all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. [0]
2. Many, many old-fashioned NDAs still require the receiving party to return or destroy all of the disclosing party's confidential information. That can be quite burdensome and expensive for electronically-stored information. (Imagine having to search all your emails and backups to identify the disclosing party's confidential information.) And in any case, as insurance for possible future litigation, the receiving party would want to keep an archive copy to document what it received — and by implication, what it didn't receive — from the disclosing party. [1]
[0] Federal Circuit case: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=679137785502826... Supreme Court case: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=168732492844241...
[1] Additional information: https://toedtclassnotes.site44.com/Notes-on-Contract-Draftin... (my course materials for the law-school business contracts class I teach; it's a still-crude interim draft)
joetheone|5 years ago
I fully admit that we do not have the legal expertise to try and tackle that problem at this point.