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Don’t get bullied into signing overly broad NDA’s or contracts. Never be afraid to walk away from heavily one-sided agreements. I have been stunned a few times

Don’t get bullied into signing overly broad NDA’s or contracts. Never be afraid to walk away from heavily one-sided agreements. I have been stunned a few times by terms proposed by very large and well-known recruitment agencies here in the UK. A few lawyers I know and a few recruiters I know who work for better firms couldn't believe them either. We're talking basic stuff like you agree to fix any defects free of charge when there's barely any spec there in the first place, you accept unlimited financial liability and must carry an amount of insurance wildly disproportionate to the value of the gig itself, you give indefinite commitments that could interrupt your future work at any time forever, you accept an NDA with enough scope to potentially exclude working within entire industries, or my personal favourite, they have a right to refuse to pay you for services rendered if they arbitrarily declare those services not to be satisfactory. I've noticed that these terms always seem to be proposed with some kind of imminent deadline. They can't possibly confirm tomorrow's introductory phone call with the real end client until you've signed their NDA and the 30 pages of unrelated legalese like the above that are bundled with it. They need you to agree in writing that you'll accept the gig based on nothing but a short summary and then they finally send the full terms late on the day before you're supposed to start and you need to agree to those as well or the deal is off. But don't worry because they've placed a million other people using those terms before and it's been reviewed thousands of times by other lawyers and remarkably not a single one has ever noticed the things you spotted in ten seconds that literally made your lawyer laugh out loud when you said "This looks bad and I shouldn't agree to it, right?". These days if I had to deal with recruiters or agencies at all and they came up with anything like that I would just take it as a big warning sign that absolutely everything they say or do is not to be trusted and must be vetted by your own legal and financial advisors before agreeing to it. Walking away becomes the default response unless the agency agrees to a counterproposal locked up tighter than Fort Knox. And those agencies never do IME so actually just walking away immediately is probably the best option.

robomartin 4y ago
We just rejected a military contract because the company wanting to hire us sent us the most ridiculous NDA I have seen in a while. The first job amounted to thermal design and simulation. Two weeks of work, maybe three. The way these contracts work, we might not hear from them for a year after that, or five. In exchange for two weeks of work they wanted us to sign a wide-and-deep five-year NDA. Five years. For two weeks of work. What’s worse is the work did not require disclosure of anything proprietary at all. Power, area and environmental conditions. That’s it. It’s just silly.

robomartin 4y ago

We just rejected a military contract because the company wanting to hire us sent us the most ridiculous NDA I have seen in a while. The first job amounted to thermal design and simulation. Two weeks of work, maybe three. The way these contracts work, we might not hear from them for a year after that, or five. In exchange for two weeks of work they wanted us to sign a wide-and-deep five-year NDA. Five years. For two weeks of work. What’s worse is the work did not require disclosure of anything proprietary at all. Power, area and environmental conditions. That’s it. It’s just silly.