How to get case studies under NDA

Your best projects are always the ones you can’t talk about.

Three years consulting for a fast-growing startup. A full rebrand for a company your next client would recognize immediately. The work that would close deals in minutes — locked behind an NDA you signed without reading carefully.

Most freelancers treat every NDA as a total blackout. That’s usually wrong.

What an NDA actually prevents you from sharing

Read the one you signed. A typical NDA protects confidential information: strategy, internal data, product roadmap, proprietary processes. It rarely prohibits mentioning the company name, confirming you worked there, or describing the general nature of the engagement.

What’s almost always off-limits: sharing deliverables, internal documents, financial data.

What’s often not off-limits: the company name, the type of work (UX audit, content strategy, backend integration), the timeline.

If you haven’t read your NDA, read it. The restriction may be narrower than you assumed. IP ownership and what transfers at delivery covers this in more detail.

Negotiate upfront, not after delivery

The right moment to establish case study rights is before you start. After delivery, the client is moving on and has no reason to give you anything.

At the proposal or contract stage, add one clause: the right to describe the project in anonymized form (or with the company name, if they agree) for portfolio purposes.

Most clients say yes. The ones who don’t usually have a legitimate reason — ongoing litigation, competitive sensitivity — and knowing upfront is better than finding out after three months of work.

Requests that are usually granted:

• Describing the project scope and your role, without identifying details
• Mentioning the company name without specifics
• Publishing with a delay (6–12 months after delivery)

What you can show without the deliverable

If the deliverable is off-limits, shift to process. Process is rarely confidential.

You can describe the problem you were hired to solve, the approach you took, the constraints you worked within, and the outcome in relative terms — “reduced support tickets by 40%” without naming the client.

A case study structured as problem → approach → outcome shows judgment and methodology. Experienced buyers don’t need to see the Figma file or the code repo. They want to understand how you think.

The activity report as concrete evidence

There’s an asset most freelancers overlook: the time record.

A structured activity report — what you worked on, how long, in which phase — shows the scale of a project without revealing anything confidential. If you name your calendar events clearly, that record already exists.

Timescanner generates this directly from your calendar. Filter by client and date range, and you get a clean breakdown: X hours on discovery, Y hours on implementation, Z on review. No deliverable, no confidential data. Just the shape of the engagement.

For a 6-month project, that’s a concrete document. More credible than a verbal description, less problematic than a deliverable screenshot.

The offboarding conversation

The end of a project is the right moment to ask. The client is (ideally) satisfied, the work is delivered, and you’re still in the relationship. Closing a project cleanly is the right time for this.

Ask two things:

1. Can I describe this project in anonymized form on my website?
2. Would you be willing to write a short testimonial?

Most will say yes to at least one. A testimonial without specifics — “Adrien delivered exactly what we needed, on scope and on time” — requires no NDA negotiation and takes them two minutes.

Build both habits from the first project. Negotiate at the start, ask at the end.