A Lot of Business Owners Get Confidentiality Wrong

Added: 2026-05-29

[00:00:00]Just because in your company, you think something should be confidential or you don't want some people outside your company to have some information, that doesn't make it confidential. Just because you have a paper or something internally in your company and you have the word confidential there, that alone is not going to make it confidential.

[00:00:17][music] Confidential things by operation of law are very limited, like attorney-client privilege or health records, juvenile records, things like that. But, you can also make things [music] legally confidential by agreement of the parties. In a way that it will not make it confidential automatically, but in a way that if someone [music] discloses that information, you can enforce it in a court of law and potentially get damages for that person disclosing. And for that, you need a confidentiality agreement, a non-disclosure agreement, something that you write and you as a company sign and the other side agrees to be bound by that agreement.

[00:00:51]Otherwise, just because you mark things confidential at the top or put a watermark in the Word document that says confidential, it's not going to make your company documents confidential.

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