> As a final note, when I left Apple for the last time, and emptied out my drawers, at the very bottom of the last drawer I found my distinctly unsigned NDA.
I wonder if that legally makes any difference? There's probably an oral or implied contract for this kind of stuff, if you keep showing up to work and they keep paying you?
I was wondering the opposite: even if you don't explicitly sign some contracts, as long as you have seen them and behave as-if you are following the contract and the other party gives you their part of the bargaining, that might be legally (almost) equivalent to having signed the contract. (I'm not a lawyer, and this is speculation.)
It seems the legal term of art for this in 'an implied contract'.
The NDA could say that by signing this I am to hand over my first born but it isn't enforceable. An obvious straw man example I admit but to make the point that signing a thing doesn't give a thing some kind of godly power.
Terminology I head in law classes over a decade ago is tacid contact and definitely was a legal contract although difficult to prove in court when I did study the little contract law I studied.
Well, you hand your employees that very sheet of paper that the protagonist found unsigned in their drawer. And trade secrets are a fairly widespread concept, too. So judges wouldn't have a hard time believing that a reasonable person would recognise trade secrets in most cases.
Yes, and I bet all the finer details of what happens in these cases if they go to court depend on a ton of precedents, and the luck of the draw with your judge and lawyers.
> As a final note, when I left Apple for the last time, and emptied out my drawers, at the very bottom of the last drawer I found my distinctly unsigned NDA.
I wonder if that legally makes any difference? There's probably an oral or implied contract for this kind of stuff, if you keep showing up to work and they keep paying you?