Trump and Sessions wants to prosecute the leakers. As we’ve seen before, stopping leaks can become a Presidential obsession. In Nixon’s White House, the Plumbers were tasked with stopping leaks of classified information, such as the Pentagon Papers. Through the Committee to Re-Elect the President (fittingly, CREEP), members of the Plumbers broke into the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, who had released the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times. Some of you may have heard about what happened next.

Presidential aides and White House staffers routinely have access to information that is intended to remain confidential. Businesses face the same issue. A company’s employees often have access to confidential or trade secret information that would be harmful in the hands of competitors, or that could damage the business if released to the general public.

It’s commonplace to require employees in such positions to sign Nondisclosure Agreements (NDAs).  NDAs typically define the scope of confidential information and require employees to refrain from using or disclosing any of it outside of work.

But what about independent contractors? Non-employees like specialists or consultants are often retained to work on sensitive company projects. In the course of that work, they are often granted access to confidential information.

Should independent contractors sign NDAs too? You bet! If they will be granted access to confidential or trade secret information, NDAs are important.

They can be used in a stand-alone agreement or as part of a broader independent contractor agreement containing other terms.

It is arguably even more important to have a contractor sign an NDA than it is for an employee to be required to sign one. Why?

Employees, by their nature, are agents of the company and are presumed to be acting to further the employer’s interests. NDAs are a useful reminder to employees of their obligations to the employer, and NDAs can expand — by contract — the scope of protection offered by trade secret laws.

Independent contractors, in contrast, are in business for themselves. They are generally not agents of the business, and any obligation they have to preserve confidential information will stem mainly from contractual obligations, rather than from trade secret law.

In fact, trade secret laws generally require a company to prove that it takes steps to safeguard the privacy of trade secret information — that is, steps to prevent other people from accessing it. By sharing trade secrets with a non-employee contractor, the company may — through that act alone — risk losing trade secret protection for their confidential business information.  They’ve shared it outside the company.

That is where NDAs come in. If a contractor is required to sign an NDA as a condition of the retention, then the employer can much more confidently share confidential and trade secret information with the contractor.

The NDA not only creates a contractual obligation on the contractor to preserve the secrecy of the information, but it also bolsters the company’s ability to show that it takes active steps to protect its confidential information. In other words, the NDA helps the business show that it does not tell an outsider its trade secrets without first obtaining a signed NDA.

The lesson here is simple. If your independent contractor will be granted access to confidential information — even incidentally or accidentally — NDAs can provide important protections to the business.

If the contractor leaks the information anyway, you can always find some goons to break into the office of the contractor’s psychiatrist to get some dirt on him.  (That was a joke. Don’t do that!) Legal remedies are available. Don’t break into anyone’s office. Please.

© 2017 Todd Lebowitz, posted on WhoIsMyEmployee.com, Exploring Issues of Independent Contractor Misclassification and Joint Employment. All rights reserved.