Why Does Every Company Think Its NDA Is Special?

You know the drill, the very moment someone says:

“Before we continue, please, sign our NDA.”

The 11-page masterpiece, written by a lawyer sometime between the Industrial Revolution and the invention of the internet.

And so it begins:

Three weeks later, two companies that wanted to talk about satellites, software, launch services, or procurement are now debating the legal definition of “confidential information.”

Most NDAs are trying to achieve exactly the same thing:

• Do not leak information.
• Do not misuse information.
• Do not be an idiot.

That is the entire spirit of the document.

Yet many organizations insist on forcing their own template as if it were a secret family barbecue sauce recipe passed down through generations.

Some clauses genuinely matter:

One of the few NDA clauses that is relevant in 2026 is the AI clause.

Not the paragraph about whether confidential information survives for three years or five.

The one that says: ” Please, do not paste our proprietary data into ChatGPT.”

Engineers, sales teams, marketers, and managers are all under pressure to move faster. AI helps. But feeding confidential technical documents, customer information, pricing data, source code, or proprietary designs into third-party AI systems creates risks that many organizations are still learning how to manage.

Most leaks will not happen because somebody is a spy. They will happen because somebody wanted a quicker summary, a better email, or a faster proposal.

Surprisingly, many NDA templates still do not address this at all.

If there is one thing worth updating in your NDA this year, it is probably not the dispute resolution clause from 2008. It is making sure confidential information stays out of tools that were never intended to become your company’s document repository.

Most other clauses are copy-pasted survivors from previous agreements, carrying obsolete legal language nobody has questioned for years.

Instead, everyone gets trapped in a wicked administrative escape room where the final puzzle is agreeing whether confidential information survives three years, five years, or forever.

At Orbitalyx, there is a growing suspicion that some companies spend more time negotiating NDAs than discussing actual business.

The most efficient partnerships are rarely built on the most aggressive paperwork.

They are built on trust, competence, and a mutual desire to get something done.

So here is a radical proposal:

If the other party already has a reasonable NDA, consider signing it.

The goal is to protect information, not to win the NDA Mundial.

Because every day spent negotiating templates is one less day spent building satellites, winning customers, or getting to orbit.

And unlike launch windows, NDA review cycles seem to have no end date…