If someone sent you an NDA through Send NDA, you got an email titled [their name] has prepared an NDA for you to sign, with a Sign NDA button. That link is yours alone: the sender has a different one. There's no sign-up or password, and signing takes a couple of minutes.
Add your details
The sender only gave us your name and email address. Before you can sign, the agreement needs your postal address: address line 1, city, postal code and country, plus line 2 where it applies. For the United States, Canada and Australia you pick your state, province or territory from a list, so it reads in the agreement the way the law names it.
You also say whether you sign as a company or as a person. A company adds its name and registration number. A person gets one more question: whether you're signing for yourself, not for a business or profession. Tick it and the agreement carries no penalty for a breach and leaves the protections your own law gives a private individual in place.
Your details go into the party block at the top of the agreement, and some of them reach its clauses: your country, your state and that answer can each take wording out. Once you continue, you see the full text with both parties in it, worked out from what you filled in.
Where your country asks for the agreement in its own language, the document carries a text in that language beside the English, and tabs above it switch between them. You sign both at once. The English is the text you're bound by. Governing law lists the languages.
Read it and sign
Read the agreement through. It shows who discloses, the purpose, the clauses the sender chose and the governing law. If something isn't what you discussed, ask the sender to change it before you sign: they can amend the NDA while neither of you has signed. If they change it while you have it open, your signature isn't recorded: the page shows the new version and asks you to sign again.
Where Italian, Romanian, Chinese or South Korean law governs the agreement, a step comes first. The page lists the clauses that weigh on you by heading, and you approve those apart from the rest: those four legal systems hold that a clause in a form the other side drew up binds you only where you approved it separately. Your approval goes into the signing record as an event of its own, beside your signature.
To sign, tick that you accept the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, then choose Sign NDA. Your signature is your name as it appears in the agreement, set in a handwriting face, or the signature you draw with a finger, a pen or a mouse. We record the time, your IP address, how you signed in and the hash of the exact text you signed. The signing record explains what that log holds.
The name on the agreement is the one the sender typed. If it's wrong, ask them to fix it before you sign.
Before anyone has signed, Download a copy on the NDA's page gives you the agreement as it stands, as a PDF with your name on it, to read and to keep. It isn't signed and binds nobody.
After you sign
The sender gets an email that you've signed, and it's their turn to countersign. You can come back to it from your dashboard in the meantime.
When the sender countersigns, the agreement is completed. We freeze it as a PDF and email it to both of you, with its signing certificate. The NDA's page then offers a Download menu with both, and your dashboard has the same download.
Keep your copy
Keep the PDF and the certificate from the email. Completed agreements and their signing record are kept until five years after the end of the confidentiality period, and anyone can check a copy against the original on the verify page. The Privacy Policy covers what we hold about you and why.