Should you make a potential lawyer sign an NDA before revealing your idea? | Hacker News Reader

Should you make a potential lawyer sign an NDA before revealing your idea?

If you are talking to a lawyer, trying to get a feel for whether or not you would like to retain them, should you be worried about them potentially stealing your business idea? If so, is an NDA necessary, and will a lawyer even consider signing, or is this whole issue taken care of by professional legal ethics?

[Of course, if a lawyer/firm started taking ideas they would quickly get a bad rep and it would probably damage their business more than they would gain from the idea. But just wondering anyways.]

There are probably 1000 more important things to worry about.

I just read you blog entry about classifying things by their rank of importance. Top 10, 100, 1000. An effective way to look at things. Although in asking this question I wasn't giving in to a worry, merely curiousity. I think it is much harder to rank things by how fruitful the curiosity about them will be. For instance, because of my question, and your response, I read an interesting post and learned a little about an interesting, successful guy (you).

Yeah, random curiosity is definitely a good thing, or at least some amount of it is (like spending 20% of your time on completely random things). But during the other 80% of the time, we just need to move forward without getting blocked by unimportant details.

Do you know how much a lawyer has to lose if (s)he even says a word about confidential stuff he just heard from you?!

You should worry more about your mom/dad/brother/girlfriend/boyfriend/best friend saying something to someone than worry about a lawyer stealing anything.

My lawyer doesn't even allow anyone to look at his laptop's screen and he never mentions his other clients.

I would wish them good luck if they wanted to take it! The hard part is the execution.

Everyone has great ideas that they can't implement. That's why I learned to program in the first place.

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