Confidentiality agreement

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Also known, to those for whom the glass is half-empty, as a non-disclosure agreement. An agreement whereby you promise not to tell. If Robert Plant were writing one, he would write it like the box on the right.

Anyhoo. Here are the main parts of a normal financial markets confidentiality agreement.

What’s in a confi?

Confis can be “one way”, where one party discloses and the other receives, or “two way”, where both parties disclose sensitive information. A broker’s template will tend to be far more generous when it is receiving only, than when it is giving information up. I know this may come as a shock to some of you.

Length

Firstly, let’s be blunt about this: there is a special place in hell for any advisor who serves up a confidentiality agreement more than 3 pages long. Even three pages is purgatorially tedious. GET TO THE POINT. It’s a goddamn confi, not the sale of your soul. Oh hang on. Why are the parties sharing the information in the first place? Typically, you’ll want to restrict use of the information to matters relevant to the project. This is likely to be defined as the “Purpose” or the “Project”. Expect to see this kind of definition, and this is somewhere you can let your sales guy go wild.

“So, legal eagles, what should I put for the “Purpose”?”
“I dunno, you tell me. What is the purpose?”
“What?”
“...You know, the purpose that you want the confidential information.”
“Ohh, right. [Pause] Well, looking at a sample portfolio to put some pricing together with a view to pitching financial services, I suppose.”
“Okay, so put that.”
“What?”
“Put that.”
“Just, that?”
“Sure.”
“Like, “looking at a sample portfolio to put some pricing together with a view to pitching a PB service, I suppose”?”
“Well, I woudn’t put, “I suppose”. but otherwise, yes.”

Sales will go away happy, any quietly believing he could have been a lawyer. And you know what? He probably could have.

What is in scope?

Parties give each other all kinds of information. Not all of it is sensitive. Seeing as an NDA imposes onerous obligations, you should carefully define the “confidential information” that’s in scope. Consider the following:

• Personal information: Personal information about individuals is particularly tricky in this age of big data and fake news. There may be additional provisions concerning storage, processing and rights to access and correct that information. Especially now the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is in force. Hoo boy.
• Client-identifying information: some data is interesting and sensitive only to the extent it is identifiable with the client. Trading data, for example. That a vodafone trade was executed at close on the 1st of September at a price of 103 isn't especially sensitive. It isn't susceptible to copyright. Not until you can refer it to the client for whom the order was executed. Then it is sensitive. Market abuse and insider trading lie this way. Careful, soldier.
• Proprietary IP and technology: Trading data tends to be valuable insofar as it relates to a given client. Other types of information (especially intellectual property: patents, copyrights, designs, trade secrets, secret sauce and so on) is valuable irrespective of the identity of the client.

What is out of scope?

What information that otherwise would be in scope, is out of scope? Even within the definition of confidential information, you’ll need to make exceptions:

• Information the receiver already held at the time of disclosure
• Information the receiver receives separately from someone else other than in breach of a confidentiality undertaking
• Information the receiver develops independently of the disclosure and without reference to information disclosed

Other tricks for young players

Information disclosed to a Regulator is still confidential information

Don’t make the schoolboy error of excluding “information required to be disclosed to regulators or government authorities” from the definition of “confidential information”. Now, to be sure, this is a legitimate exception to a fellow’s general covenant not disclose confidential information to anyone — but it shouldn’t disqualify the information from being “confidential information” altogether. If it did, once you were required to give any information to a regulator, it would suddenly be open season and you could tell everyone about it. Not the intention.

One misconceived argument we have seen for this approach is as follows: “if I give information to a regulator then I cannot control what the regulator does with it. Regulators are all-powerful. They may publish sensitive information in the Luxembourger Wort for all I can do about it. Therefore your information, once I have rightly given it to a regulator, can no longer be treated as confidential.”

Not so fast: If you disclose my information legitimately to a regulator, and the regulator then discloses it to the world (whether or not legitimately) you have complied with the terms of your contract. Unless you have independently covenanted to procure that the regulator keeps it confidential (don’t do that: regulators are all-powerful, and you make yourself a hostage to fortune), you have not breached your NDA, and you cannot therefore be liable for resulting losses. They are regrettable externalities: obstreporous actions of impish third parties. On the other hand, if you disclose my information legitimately to a regulator, and then you separately disclose it to someone else, then you absolutely can and should remain liable for losses. If by disclosure to a regulator the information is deemed "no longer confidential" you would be free to disclose it to someone else without that sanction.

Proprietary information

If your definition starts with “information belonging to the discloser” or “proprietary information” then you have excluded most of the data you are seeking to protect. “Belonging to” implies “possession”, implies “property” implies “intellectual property”. Intellectual property subsists in creative works — copyright, patent and trademarks — but not in facts or raw data. To be yours, you have to have created it. Your trading data, your client lists, your employees — this is not information belonging to you. It is information relating to you which (QED) the receiving party wants but does not have, which is why it is worthy of protection by contract even though no intellectual property rights attach to it.

What is the confidentiality obligation?

Now you know what counts as confidential information, what can you do with it and what’s not allowed?

You’ll often see:

• Keep the information confidential. Don’t disclose it except to a limited group of people — and you may be required to ensure that these people only receive the information subject to an equivalent duty of confidentiality:
  • Inside the organisation: In a large organisation this may be to a small group of people in the organisation (for example, credit, legal or the on-boarding team). There may be specific restrictions to prevent it getting to trading desks or front office personnel who may use the information to profit from it (this will usually be illegal: it’s likely to constitute insider trading or market abuse, but no harm is specifying in the contract).
  • Outside the organisation: you may be allowed to share it with your professional advisers, and to regulators and quasi regulatory authorities (stock exchanges etc) where required by law (or you reasonably consider it expedient). There may be some tiresome details about only giving in formation that is reasonably necessary, and taking what steps are necessary to take legal action to prevent disclosures to regulators. One classic common error is to classify information that must be disclosed to courts or regulators as no longer confidential. This is wrong: It is still, in you hands, confidential. Obviously you cannot be blamed for miscreants in the public regulatory system who then misuse it, but you must still keep to your own word.
• Only use it to carry out the “purpose” or “project”: This is somewhat hard to enforce — it’s nebulous, right? — and in practice you’ll never know what goes on behind closed doors, but in the English law-speaking world this is pretty uncontroversial precisely because it isn’t practically actionable. But our North American cousins — and those on the private side of the investment banking wall — can get very worked up over it.
• Not make unnecessary copies: Not the sort of thing to argue about, but not necessary either: you can xerox the information a thousand times, if that floats your boat, and that won’t cause me any more damage than had you only xeroxed it once — unless you then give it to someone you shouldn’t. It is not the act of copying it that causes the loss, but your subsequent carelessness with the copies. But, still, would you strike that out of a draft? No.

Obligation to notify provider of regulator requests

This is a common and oft accepted provision: where you are obliged to disclose to a regulator, you must first notify the provider of the information, to allow them to make representations, or try to get an injunction, to prevent disclosure. However excitable your counterparty is on this point — and junior lawyers at real money firms can be quite exciteable — resist this. It is potty. When you step through it, it is hard to see any real-world cases where your counterparty could or would actually try to stop disclosure to a regulator, and plenty of benign circumstances where disclosure is a matter of course. To wit:

• Trade/transaction reporting: Brokers will be obliged to disclose a lot of trade-specific client information to regulators and exchanges every day on account of MiFID/EMIR trade and trade reporting. We are not going to repeatedly tell the client that.
• Ad-hoc general information requests: Outside trade/transaction reporting, when regulators ask for ad hoc information from a broker, it is usually for a wide-ranging data set across whole trading books and sectors, covering multiple clients. It is unrealistic to accept Brokers to monitor which clients within that population have confis, much less a right to be specifically notified beforehand. Nor will they want to go to the trouble of getting all those consents. Why? BECAUSE LIFE IS TOO SHORT.
• Ad-hoc client-specific information requests: Where a regulator specifically asks for data on a single client, it is likely the regulator will also have made equivalent disclosure requests to the client at the same time (or copied the client on those requests to the broker) — if the request is benign — and if it has not, the investigation is likely to be one where the regulator would not allow the broker to alert the client anyway, and indeed where such notification could be a criminal offence (market abuse, etc). Even where the notification clause carves out where “notification being illegal” this leaves the empty set of circumstances where the broker would have to give info about a specific client and the client doesn’t, but was entitled to know about it.
• Commercial sensitivity: Lastly, the legitimate point of a confi is to respect the client’s legitimate interest in protecting the commercial value of non-public information. It is not to keep silent about behavioural turpitude; indeed a broker’s regulatory obligations may oblige it to report, without invitation, bad acts it observes, whether the client likes it or not and whether there is a confidentiality agreement or not. Generally, client information a broker holds is not legally or professionally privileged. Since, by definition, passing information to a regulator should not prejudice the commercial value of that information, it is hard to see when client would have a valid reason to seek injunctive relief to prevent disclosure of information to a competent regulator.

And that is borne out by the JC’s tawdry personal experience (anecdotal though it may be, it does span 22 years and three different investment banks): the JC has never ever, ever seen anyone even try to get an injunction to stop disclosure of confidential information to a regulator.

Cut-out-and-keep response

Try sending your counterpart something like this (put “dear —”, and “kind regards” around it, of course):

Disclosure to regulators There are three main reasons a regulator might require confidential information from us relating to a client: Trade/transaction reporting: Brokers will be obliged to disclose a lot of trade-specific client information to regulators and exchanges every day on account of Dodd Frank and other regulatory reporting regimes (for example MiFID/EMIR trade and trade reporting). You should assume we will do that. Ad-hoc general information requests: Outside trade/transaction reporting, when regulators ask for ad hoc information from us, it is usually for a wide-ranging data set across whole trading books and sectors, covering multiple clients. Given the benign nature of these requests, it is not practicable to obtain consents or make disclosures to all affected clients beforehand. Ad-hoc client-specific information requests: Where a regulator specifically asks for data on a single client, either: if the request is benign, the regulator is likely to have made equivalent disclosure requests to the client at the same time (or copied the client on those requests to the broker), or if the request is not — that is, the investigation is one where the regulator would not allow us to alert the client anyway, we would not be able to, and such notification could be a criminal offence. Thus, even where the notification clause carves out where “notification being illegal” this leaves the empty set of circumstances where we would have to give info about a specific client and the client doesn’t, but was entitled to know about it. Lastly, a confidentiality agreement is designed to respect the client’s legitimate interest in protecting the commercial value of non-public information. It is not meant to be a tool to prevent regulatory disclosure. Generally, we will not be in a position to make demands as to how a regulator treats that information when we disclose it. Since passing information to a regulator should not generally prejudice the commercial value of that information, it is hard to see when client would have a valid reason to seek injunctive relief to prevent disclosure of information to a competent regulator, and our experience is that no client has ever in fact attempted to do so.

The disclosing party will, of course, want to be able to conclusively get the confidential information back out of your sticky mitts at the end of the project. Hence the Return of information provision.

Return, or put beyond practical use?

In this modern era of distributed network computing, the usual entreaties to “return all copies of information” are faintly absurd: as if they’ve been kept in a manila folder in a filing cabinet somewhere, only inspected by chaperoned employees wearing white cotton gloves. Of course, everything will have been transmitted electronically, will exist in clouds, on blockchains and on servers all around the world, and the very action of attempting to “return” it will oblige it to be copied onto other servers etc. etc. Some of these copies will be stored for years under legally mandated document retention policies, but other entities will just be anal — or useless — about hoarding information.

So the real ask ought to be “to put beyond practical use” and have an exception for regulatory retention, and the practical realities of how information technology actually works: every internal email creates copies on all kinds of different servers and so on; non-magnetic erasures can in theory be undone. Theoretical eradication of a file is impossible; what matters is practical removal of the information from persons in whose grubby fingers the poor discloser’s (cough) legitimate business interests can suffer.

Derived information

There’s also a conceptual issue with information the receiving party has derived from the confidential information.

Derived information, the fecund fruits of the receiver’s own creative juice and analytical energy, worked upon information given to the receiver by the discloser, is in no sense “proprietary” to the disclosing party, and may indeed be as commercially sensitive to the receiving party as the material the disclosing party gave, and on which it was based, it in the first place: think of Paul’s middle eight about having a shave and catching the bus in A Day in the Life. We are in danger of getting into the jurisprudential wisdom of treating intellectual endeavour as if it were tangible property — but let’s not go there just now.

Actually, no: let’s do go there. If the information in question not, in the first place, mine — that is to say, it isn’t intellectual property in the first place, then the question arises why I should be able to stop you deriving your own intellectual property out of it. This boils down to whether it was just secret data, but didn’t have any proprietary qualities, or whether it can be somehow regarded as proprietary, owned information — the articulation of which required some kind of creative impulse.

If it is only data, it does not have the quality intellectual property at all, so the receiving party’s act in deriving some new type of creative work out of it is a novel thing, owes nothing to the discloser’s disclosure as such, builds upon no intellectual property of the discloser, and should not, therefore, be restricted at all. What loss could there be? The data still cannot be disclosed to anyone in a way that would betray the discloser’s confidence, but the derivation may well obliterate any confidentiality in the original document: say you give me a thousand characters of data (i.e. not intellectual property as such), on condition that I keep it confidential. And let’s say I rearrange the thousand characters into, for argument’s sake, a sonnet (which is prima facie susceptible of copyright protection — by me). Are there economic or legal justifications for obliging me to destroy that sonnet, or return it to you, under a confidentiality covenant? Humble report, sir, the answer is “no”.

On the other hand, if the information you have given me is copyrighted then the agreement you need is a licence, not an NDA. And, there, you can control, within limits, by the law of copyright, the licencee’s ability to derive new material from it.

In any case, you should not have to offer up derived information to the discloser.Query whether it should have to even be destroyed or put beyond practical use. I mean, can you imagine a world without a McCartney middle eight, just because Lennon had the hump?

Fussy elaborations

If your game is to engage in a protracted round of pointless horse-trading, you could try imposing some arbitrary formalities upon compliance with this clause: a 14 day period within which to comply, for example; an obligation for a director or officer of the recipient to certify that the clause has been complied with.

Possibility of injunctions

Some people like to acknowledge that the potential consequences of breach of confidence are so severe that ordinary contractual damages might not be adequate and equitable relief might be the only means of protecting your position. Injunctions, dawn raids and so on. Whatever floats your boat. Really an acknowledgment so that the poor wronged person who goes to the courts of chancery seeking injunctive relief can point to M'lud and say, “You see, your honour? That rascal knew perfectly well I might need an injunction here.”

Like I say, whatever floats your boat.

No representations or warranties

Another one for the “I never said it was” file, a clear disclaimer that when giving you this information, I never said it was accurate or good for anything. so you can’t sue me if you rely on it and lose money.

Term

Some folks will insist on a hard stop, say two years, after which supplied information ceases to be confidential. Inhouse lawyers may profess themselves to be immutably bound to have such a term by internal policy]]. While the commercial value of much information does go stale over time (blueprints fo a BetaMax, anyone?), this isn’t universally true — a client list is valuable however long you hold it — and the usual justification for the hard stop (“we don't have the systems to indefinitely hold infoirmation subject to confidence and don't want indeterminate liability for breach”) is a canard. Whatever information security systems you do have don’t suddenly stop working after three years. And as for indeterminate liability — well, no harm no foul: if the information really is stale then no loss follows from a breach, right? No loss, no damages.

What a confi shouldn't have

The following often make their way into a confi agreement, though none really have any business being there.

• An Exclusivity clause
• A Mon-solicitation clause
• An indemnity

Special AKA

The same as a:

• Non-disclosure agreement
• NDA
• Confi

See also

• Confidence
• Confidentiality Agreement - Rock 'n' Roll Style