A second read should not be a luxury. We made it ordinary.
Everyone who signs a contract deserves to understand it first. BeforeJD™ gives you a careful, plain-English first read. You arrive at any conversation prepared, whether it is with an attorney or with the other side. 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
The tools to understand what you are signing should not cost more than the contract itself.
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.The problem
A careful second read of a routine agreement has been hard to come by. Most people sign without one, even when they care, because nothing quick and plain was within reach.The gap
The people who most need to understand what they are signing are often the ones with the least time to spare. A first read in minutes lets them walk into any conversation, including one with an attorney, already knowing what to ask.What we built
A calm, plain-English second read. Every read is checked by a second reader before it reaches you, and the findings come back in one clear report. It tells you what is fair, what is worth pushing back on, and the words to ask for instead.
Leadership
Elizabeth Olsen
CEO and Co-Founder
Elizabeth Olsen is the CEO and a co-founder of BeforeJD. She founded and runs a bookkeeping firm that cleans up the books of small businesses across the country, where 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. She leads BeforeJD, which helps an owner understand a contract, change it, draft a new one and keep track of it, with signing for teams, before the cost reaches the books.
She began her career as an officer in the Army’s Transportation Corps, then led teams in retail and banking before turning to small-business finance.
She earned a Bachelor of Science in Economics from the United States Military Academy at West Point and an MBA from the University of Colorado.
Eric Olsen
Founder and President
Eric Olsen founded BeforeJD in 2026. The idea came from a question family and friends asked him again and again: will you read this before I sign it? BeforeJD gives anyone that careful second read, in plain English, before they sign, and then helps them change the contract, draft a new one and keep track of it, with signing for teams.
Eric has spent more than twenty years in commercial leadership, building teams that bring new technology to market and negotiating complex enterprise agreements. He has seen firsthand how much a single clause can cost, and how rarely the person signing has the time or the help to read it. Before his business career, he served eight years as a field artillery officer in both the active and reserve components of the Army and left the service as a captain.
He is completing a Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Texas at Austin. He earned an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, a Master of Engineering Management from Penn State and a Bachelor of Science in Systems Engineering from the United States Military Academy at West Point.
BeforeJD LLC is a service-disabled veteran-owned company in Houston, Texas, certified under the Texas VetHUB program.
How we read it
A careful method, not a single guess.
Every read is checked by a second reader before it reaches you, and every quotation is checked against your contract.
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.A second reader, not one opinion
A second reader checks every read before it reaches you. Risks are never quietly averaged away.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.Grounded in your document
Every finding cites the exact line that triggered it. Every quotation is checked against the contract, and words we cannot find there are never shown as the contract's words.
Who it is for
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
In minutes, you get a plain-English first read that names the red flags, points out missing protections, and hands you the words to ask for instead. When a deal calls for a lawyer, you arrive prepared.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. A client who brings a first read can arrive with sharper questions.
Stance-aware readingPlain-language findingsA second reader, not one opinionPrivate by default