A couple of months ago I wrote about the increasing number of RAMS (risk assessment and method statements) that photographers are having to submit. As is often the case, that prompted a question from someone who’d read the piece asking about a similar matter. This time it was NDAs or non-disclosure agreements. Oh boy! That opened up a can of worms. Some colleagues claiming that they always refuse to sign them, others saying that they often edited them before signing and others, like me, realising that they’ve become a fact of life and barely skimming them before adding their signature.

Before 2008 I genuinely don’t remember ever having had to sign an NDA. I always took it as read that if some confidential information was shared with me, it stayed confidential (I guess that would be unless there was some illegality involved but that never came up). A lot of my work was (and still is) editorial and releases are often embargoed – a system that I have always respected and abided by.

I signed my first NDA in late 2008 and ever since then the number, frequency and length of the documents has grown considerably. My first one was about half a sheet of A4 paper in a reasonably sized font. Some of the more recent ones have been two, three and four pages of tightly packed A+ legalese. Times change and lawyers get to dictate a lot of the changes.

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