Once upon a time, the primary value of most companies lay in their physical materials–their inventory, their physical plant, etc. Increasingly, however, the value of a company lies in its intellectual property. Some of this intellectual property, such as trade secrets, needs to be protected by nondisclosure agreements (NDAs). You are going to need a non-disclosure agreement lawyer to draft these agreements appropriately.
Schedule FREE ConsultationBusinesses use non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) primarily to protect trade secrets that do not enjoy the protection of patent, copyright, or trademark law. A trade secret can be anything from the formula for the KFC secret recipe to lists of key customers. Colorado law places certain restrictions on NDAs.
NDAs restrict the use of confidential information by employees both during and after their employment. To enjoy recourse to the courts for misappropriation of your company’s trade secrets, your company must demonstrate an effort to preserve its confidentiality. A well-drafted NDA accomplishes this purpose.
Our law firm employees have extensive experience in planning, drafting, reviewing, and revising non-disclosure agreements, as well as other types of confidentiality agreements. We are well-versed in drafting the following types of confidentiality agreements, among others:
The protected information might include:
Confidentiality agreements can protect many other forms of information as well.
At Sequoia Legal, we have worked with a great variety of institutional clients, including:
Our clients have included private companies, public companies, non-profits, institutional investors, and entrepreneurs. We provide ongoing legal support, as well as help with single transactions such as mergers and acquisitions.
At Sequoia Legal, we take an active and continuing interest in your organization’s long-term success. Our non-disclosure agreement attorneys can leverage our decades of combined experience to help you avoid common pitfalls and take a long-term perspective on moves that your company is making right now.
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Yes, under almost any circumstances, you can talk to your lawyer about your NDA. Typically it is not the existence of the NDA itself that is secret, but the information that the NDA describes. Even if your lawyer does look at the NDA, it would be illegal for them to disclose this information due to a legal principle known as attorney-client privilege.
Yes, under most circumstances, you can. An NDA, for example, cannot prevent you from reporting illegal company activity and exercising your right to sue (for racial discrimination, for example). If it did purport to prevent you from suing over illegal company activity, the NDA itself would be void as a matter of public policy.
Of course, you can certainly sue under an NDA if someone who is bound by the NDA discloses information about legal company activity for which the NDA forbids disclosure.
You should definitely hire an attorney to draft your NDA agreement for you, and attorneys aren’t cheap. An attorney might charge you $175 an hour or more, and it might take several billable hours to draft the agreement. Contrast that expense, however, with the expense of losing critical company information due to a poorly-drafted NDA.
Yes, definitely. Arguably, a lawyer should draft the entire NDA. At least have an experienced business attorney look over your NDA to make sure it doesn’t contain any errors that could come back to haunt you later.
At Sequoia Legal, we bring our diverse experiences and know-how to solve complex problems for our domestic and international business clients. Our aim is to understand your objectives and effectively achieve them while maximizing their rights and limiting their risk
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Wilson B.
We are an out-of-state company that hired Sequoia Legal to crack down on some Colorado companies that were blatantly infringing our trademarks and software copyrights. Sequoia Legal shut them down in a matter of weeks and secured generous compensation for our damages.`Sequoia Legal epitomizes professionalism.
Walter R.
Our previous attorney had drafted us NDAs that were so full of holes that it left unscrupulous former employees almost complete freedom to deal with our trade secrets as they wished. Sequoia Legal helped us plug those loopholes and prevent further leakage of valuable trade secrets. I can’t recommend them highly enough.
Grace F.
We hired Sequoia Legal to help us organize and protect our intellectual property needs. They identified problems we didn’t even know we had, and they helped us head off serious oversights that might have bankrupted our company if we hadn’t caught them in time.