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HR Support on Nondisclosure Agreements
Editor's Note: Don't let confidential information fall into the wrong hands!
Overview: One type of employment contract is the nondisclosure agreement. Employers should use nondisclosure agreements to prevent employees (or prospective employees) from taking an employer's confidential nonpublic information to a competitor or sharing the information with another individual who uses it to the employer's disadvantage. An employer's confidential information could include trade secrets and other proprietary information, such as research and development, designs, ideas, techniques, methods and processes, customer lists, and other nonpublic information.
Nondisclosure agreements may be particularly critical to new businesses or existing organizations that have created a new product or service. By being proactive and requiring employees to sign a nondisclosure agreement, employers will be in a better position to recover against a former employee who steals an employer's confidential information or trade secrets for his or her benefit.
Even with an employee's signature on a nondisclosure agreement, theft of an employer's proprietary information may still occur - and is not uncommon. Therefore, employers should take measures to maintain the confidentiality of such information by restricting unauthorized access to this information, creating security codes on the computer system and by requiring nonemployees, such as customers, to sign a nondisclosure agreement.
Trends: Many states have adopted a version of the Uniform Trade Secrets Act, which provide the employer with an added level of protection for their trade secrets, regardless of whether the employee signed an appropriate nondisclosure agreement. However, in order to ensure protection, employers should still require employees who have access to an employer's confidential information to sign a nondisclosure agreement in the event the information taken by an employee does not rise to the level of a trade secret under the Act.
Author: Melissa A. Silver, JD, Legal Editor
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About this topic
Guidance for HR on the use of nondisclosure agreements to protect confidential information.