More Than a Report: Redline, the Contract Assistant, and BeforeJD for iPhone

When we started, the job was simple to describe: read a contract the way a careful friend would, and tell you in plain English what is fair and what is worth pushing back on. That report is still the foundation of every read. But a report you cannot act on is only half finished. You still have to write the pushback yourself, ask your own follow-up questions, and remember what you decided by the time you actually sit down to negotiate.

Four things changed that. Three are new capabilities that ship with every read. The fourth is a new way to get to all of it.

Your contract, returned redlined

The clearest way to ask for a different term is to show the exact language you want instead of it, in the document itself. BeforeJD now drafts that language directly. For every clause worth pushing back on, we write the replacement wording and return a marked-up copy of your contract, with tracked changes, clause by clause, the same way an editor would mark up a draft.

The marked-up copy arrives alongside your report by email, and it is available to review and download from the report itself, on the web and in the iPhone app. Open it, accept or reject each change, and send it back. You are not starting from a blank page or guessing at legal phrasing. You are handed the document with the fix already written in.

A spoken assistant that only knows your contract

The report answers the questions we thought to ask. It cannot answer the question you actually have, the one specific to your situation, at 11 p.m. the night before you sign. The Contract Assistant is a live, spoken conversation about your contract, built for exactly that moment.

It answers only from your finished analysis. Ask what the non-compete actually stops you from doing, or what the termination clause means if you need to walk away early, and every answer points back to a specific line on your page. It does not reach outside your document for a generic legal opinion, and it does not guess. If the analysis does not cover something, it tells you that, instead of inventing an answer that sounds confident and is not grounded in anything you uploaded.

Every conversation, saved automatically

A spoken answer is only useful if you can still find it later. Every Contract Assistant conversation is saved to a Discussion tab on your report, automatically, with a short written summary and the full transcript of what was asked and answered.

That matters more than it sounds like it should. The advice you get talking through a contract at night is easy to half-remember by the time you are actually across the table negotiating it days later. Now it is written down, attached to the report, and there whenever you go back to it.

BeforeJD is now on the App Store

BeforeJD for iPhone is live. Scan a paper contract with your camera, or share a file to BeforeJD straight from any app on your phone, and get the same plain-English report you trust on the web, redline included. Sign in with Face ID, get a notification the moment your read is ready, and pick up the Contract Assistant on your phone exactly where you left off on the web. Credits work across both, so a read you buy on one is a read you can use on the other.

Download BeforeJD on the App Store.

The report was never the whole point

None of this replaces the careful read that starts every contract in the first place. We wrote about why BeforeJD checks every read for that reason: the analysis has to be right before anything built on top of it is worth trusting. Redline, the Contract Assistant, and Discussion all exist to make that analysis something you can actually use, not just something you can read.

The goal has not changed since the first version of BeforeJD. You should not have to sign something you do not understand, and you should not have to sign it alone. A calm, plain-English read was the first step. A drafted redline, a spoken assistant grounded in your own document, a saved record of every conversation, and the whole thing in your pocket on your iPhone. That is what “not alone” looks like now.