Template:Confi term

So must your confi have a term? Some insist on a hard stop, say two years, after which confidential information ceases to be confidential.

Many inhouse lawyers profess themselves immutably bound to such a term, by internal policy. They would sooner be broken upon a wheel than let this one go. This policy, they will intuit, will date from the days of the First Men, perhaps after an unfortunate misunderstanding in 1989. and have subsequently hardened, encrusted, calcified, petrified, and finally fossilised itself into a layer deep in the firm’s organisational substrate without anyone ever having really understood what the issue was that prompted it, much less being able to articulate it now. In the thirty odd years since, generations of employees of that firm have since circulated the market, inculcated with strong sense that some ineffable calamity would befall them, their firm, the market or indeed the entire industry should this sacred covenant ever be breached. It has now become part of the folklore of the financial services markets. You have to have a term, and it can’t be longer than two years at the most.

Now perhaps the JC is that long-prophesied seal of the forthcoming apocalypse (actually that might explain a few things, come to think of it) but personally he has never been able to understand what this term covenant could possible achieve? What, after a couple of years I can suddenly start blaring all your secrets from the minarets around town, without so much as a by-your-leave?

While the commercial value of much information does go stale over time (blueprints for 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 just don't have the systems to indefinitely hold information subject to confidence and don't want indeterminate liability for breach”) is a canard — a palpably false one at that, for a regulated financial institution. 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.