Confidential Disclosure Agreements (CDA)
CDAs are contracts between parties who are disclosing and receiving confidential information. The CDA specifies that the receiving party will protect and use the information provided only for the purposes of determining whether or not to move forward with a commercialization agreement. CDAs are also referred to as nondisclosure or secrecy agreements.

A CDA serves three purposes:

1. It alerts the receiving party to the confidentiality of the information to be received.
2. It specifies the responsibilities required of the receiving party.
3. It can be used as evidence in subsequent patent processing, e.g., to defeat an allegation that the invention is not novel because the inventor treated it as public information. This kind of allegation arises frequently from those contesting a potentially lucrative patent, so a CDA is more than a "mere formality."

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