A second read should not be a luxury.We made it ordinary.
You should not need an attorney on retainer to understand what you are about to sign. BeforeJD gives everyone a careful, plain-English read of their contract. It is calm, grounded, and on your side.
You will not sign this alone.
9.1 Employee assigns to the Company all right, title, and interest in any work product conceived during the term, whether or not created during working hours, including independent projects.
Worth pushing back on
This clause could claim your nights-and-weekends projects. We would ask to limit it to work done on company time and equipment. That is the norm.
Our story 01
The tools to understand what you are signing should not cost more than the contract itself.
01
Where it started
People kept getting blindsided by contracts they had already signed. A non-compete buried on page fourteen. An ownership clause that quietly claimed their side projects. An auto-renewal that locked in a bad deal for another year.02
The problem
Paying a lawyer to review a routine agreement rarely pencils out. The review can cost more than the deal is worth. So most people sign without a second read because the only door open to them was an expensive one, even when they care.03
The gap
Legal help is one of the most common things people skip on cost. The people who most need a careful read of what they are signing are the same people who can least afford an hour of an attorney’s time.04
What we built
A calm, plain-English second read. Independent reviewers examine your contract from different angles, then reconcile their findings into one clear report. It tells you what is fair, what is worth pushing back on, and the words to ask for instead.
Leadership 02
Elizabeth Olsen
Chief Executive Officer
Elizabeth Olsen earned a degree in Economics from West Point and an MBA from the University of Colorado. She is the founder of Poised Books, a bookkeeping practice where she cleans up the finances of small businesses and teaches owners to keep them in order.
Cleaning up the books of small businesses, she saw the same problem again and again: a lease, a vendor agreement, or a financing term the owner had signed without fully reading, and was now paying for. A lawyer could have caught it, but few of her clients could justify that bill for a routine contract. She leads BeforeJD to catch those terms before an owner signs, instead of months later in the books.
How we read it 03
A careful method, not a single guess.
Independent reviewers read your contract from different angles, then reconcile what they find. Deterministic rules catch the things a single read might miss.
01
Domain-specific playbooks
A lease is read against lease rules, a job offer against employment rules, a freelance deal against freelance rules. The review knows what to look for before it starts reading.02
A council, not one opinion
Independent reviewers analyze your contract separately, each with a distinct mandate. Where they disagree, the most protective reading wins. Risks are never quietly averaged away.03
Stance-aware reading
The same clause means different things to a tenant and a landlord, to an employee and an employer. The read is calibrated to your side of the table, so it stays relevant to your situation.04
Grounded in your document
Every finding cites the exact line that triggered it. Anything that cannot be traced back to the words on your page is stripped out before it ever reaches your report.
Who it is for 04
Informed consent should be the standard, not the exception.
Understanding what you sign should be a baseline right, not a premium service.
For everyone
Individuals and small businesses
For a fraction of a single billable hour, you get a plain-English read that names the red flags, points out missing protections, and hands you the words to ask for instead.For legal professionals
Attorneys and firms
A fast first pass that surfaces issues and helps prioritize billable time. The review handles systematic, pattern-based reading. You bring the strategy and the professional judgment.
Stance-aware readingPlain-language findingsA council, not one opinionPrivate by default