I'm tearing my hair out!
I'm a scientist, with a reasonable-ish understanding of IP. I'm trying to coordinate a four-party NDA.
It's so so difficult. I'm passing drafts from legal team to legal team, and just not getting any further forward! It's been going on for months.
The scientists (academic and industry) are all keen to work together, but we can't do anything. I suggested the legal teams met to talk through it, rather than send multiple revisions, and you'd think I'd suggested they should attend an orgy or something!
The stupid thing is, I've been part of an award-winning academic-industry collaboration (which was much "higher risk" in terms in actually selling things made from the research), and it was held up as an example of what to do. With this new one, we can't even manage a first meeting. This is only an NDA, so presumably we have to go through this all over again for an actual Collaboration Agreement.
Have legal/commercial departments just become far more risk-averse over the last ten years? Or was I more shielded from it as a PhD student and postdoc? On this they're suggesting we follow up every meeting with a written document stating what we said that was confidential, which I haven't seen before.
A friend has recently not joined a collaboration because the paperwork took so long the PhD student she wanted as the postdoc on it finished and left to go elsewhere and she became pregnant. She's had the baby now, and I still don't think it's running! I thought that was just an unfortunate one-off, but perhaps it's always like this and I just didn't realise?