Small Print. Why I built this, and who it is for
Louise Onikoyi, Founder, BeforeYouSign
I have spent years as GC reading contracts like the ones you are being asked to sign. Boardrooms, deal calls, negotiation tables. I know how they are constructed. I know the clauses that look standard but are not. I know the sentences that seem like boilerplate until something goes wrong, and then they become the most expensive words in the document. For the last eight months I have been building something that gives non-lawyers access to the same reading, in minutes, for the cost of a coffee.
Here is what nobody tells you: contracts are deliberately hard to read. They are long. They are dense. They are written to protect the drafter, not the person signing. That is not an accident. That is the design.
For most people, there have only ever been two options.
Pay a solicitor you cannot afford. Or sign and hope.
BeforeYouSign exists because that is a false choice.
What Small Print is
Every month I take one clause, one situation, one real commercial risk, and explain exactly what it means and what you can do about it. No jargon. No hedging. Just clarity.
Not because the subject is simple. Because you deserve to understand it.
The people I talk to every week are not naive. They are freelancers, founders, consultants leaving corporate jobs, and small business owners who are smart in their field and facing a document that was deliberately designed to be confusing.
They signed without reading it properly. Something went wrong. Now they are chasing an invoice that is ninety days overdue, stuck in a project that will not end, or blocked from working in their own industry for twelve months because of a clause they did not understand.
Small Print is for them. And for anyone who has ever signed something and quietly wondered what it actually meant.
What BeforeYouSign does
BYS reads your contract before you sign it. It tells you what the payment terms actually say. What happens if the client changes their mind. Whether you own the work when the project ends. What you are on the hook for if something goes wrong.
It does not give you legal advice. It gives you commercial clarity. The kind that used to cost £300 an hour and two weeks of waiting. You get it in minutes.
The first cohort of founding users is now closed. Cohort 2 opens this summer — twenty seats, by application. Free contract reviews are available to anyone on the site.
Find out more at beforeyousign.uk.
How to use this space
Between issues I will be on Notes. Three kinds: the clause to check in the contract sitting in your inbox right now, the pull quote that landed me in the right room with the wrong document, and the story of building all of this in public.
The comments and DMs are where the community lives. If you have a question about something you have been handed to sign, ask it. If you have been burned by a contract you did not fully understand, and most people have at some point, this is a good place to talk about it.
Subscribe so you do not miss an issue.
Tell me. What is the one clause in a contract you have signed — or are being asked to sign — that you have never fully understood? Drop it in the comments. I will answer every one.
And if you know a freelancer or founder who has never actually read a contract properly, send them this. They will thank you later.
Louise
Founder, BeforeYouSign · Writer, Small Print