Confidentiality Agreement
As part of quoting a GrabCad project I am asked to accept a confidentiality agreement and under the Liability section puts the engineer in a exposed position to be sued for any reason with no recourse. I wonder if everyone reads this agreement and understands the full liability that it creates. Please advise.
1 Answer
Rick, if you refer to the confidentiality agreement that you have to accept when you apply for the job, then the liability legalities mean that in case the engineer breaches the confidentiality clauses (e.g publishes the project information, drawings, etc publicly in the internet, etc), then monetary remedy is one mean to compensate it.
The second paragraph mentioning any other relief (besides monetary) means that in case of breach the company can request immediate action to minimize the damage (i.e the engineer is asked to take down any published information). This both in addition to or instead of the monetary remedy. A very simplistic case is when engineer uploads client's project in the public Library. In such situation we firstly ask the engineer to take it down/make private immediately, and not penalize financially.
Many of the companies are generally concerned about where their information ends up, therefore such inclusion of both monetary and non-monetary remedy. To keep things in balance for the engineers, we (GrabCAD) decided against including any fixed penalty amounts in the agreement and have the non-monetary part as an option. This is not meant to mean that the engineer can be sued for anything without cause.
Hope that clarifies the topic better.
