Part 2 of 3: Fundamentals of NDAs

Confidentiality/Non-disclosure agreements (“NDAs”) discuss how and when non-public information can be shared between parties and how and when such information may be disclosed to third parties, if at all. Appropriately drafted NDAs focus on information that is valuable or protected and that is not already publicly available. The information should have commercial value (such as non-obvious technical information, confidential commercial information, or information that would be considered a trade secret); alternatively, an NDA may concern information in a party’s possession that if disclosed to others could expose the party to criminal or civil liability.

Have you heard the tale about how one blogger-angry at Maytag for its terrible customer service-attracted 2,906 comments on her blog at dooce.com and reached one million others with her tweets? You can bet that the frustration she had with her Kenmore washer was nothing compared to the headaches her rants caused the parent company. Did Maytag learn from its mistakes? According to Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler, officers at Forrester Research and authors of Empowered (Harvard Business Review Press, September 14, 2010), they did: The company now responds to tweets that its customers post online. But they would have caused themselves less grief and negative publicity if they had a strategy in place to empower their employees to reach out to their customers online. According to Bernoff and Schadler, "To succeed with empowered customers, you must empower your employees to solve customer problems.

How many enterprises have found their data under attack in the past year? All of them, according to a new survey of C-level executives in the U.K.

If everyone is under attack, how many have had their defenses pierced? In surveying 115 executives from a wide range of industries, research firm Ponemon Institute found that 77 percent have experienced data breaches at some point. The study, it should be noted, was sponsored by IBM, so the usual caveats about vendor-sponsored research apply.