July 30th, 2025
DO I NEED AN ATTORNEY TO REVIEW MY PHYSICIAN CONTRACT? by Jim Vogele
Attorney Review?
The title to this brief musing by a physician contract review attorney compels a negative answer. Of course you do not “need an attorney to review” your contract.
Wording is important.
A more nuanced consideration of the question, however, suggests that a better answer would point out that it depends upon several factors, including the stage of your career when you are presented with an employment contract — and specifically whether you have previously been a party to a physician contract (it matters not for present purposes whether we are talking about an Oregon, Washington, or California physician contract).
The most prudent approach to due diligence, if you are a physician who is just completing residency or fellowship, suggests that you may be well-advised to have an attorney review your first physician contract (first, that is, setting aside your house staff, resident, fellow, trainee or internship agreements and the like). It doesn’t necessarily need to be an attorney who focuses on physician contract reviews, but it doesn’t hurt to discuss your physician contract with such an attorney. As I’ve said elsewhere, most experienced employment attorneys are well-versed in contract law and have seen a variety of contracts in the employment setting (often for managers and tech workers). A number of black letter legal provisions of your agreement as a physician will be similar to provisions found in any written employment agreement for a professional employee, particularly licensed employees (think attorneys, architects, engineers, financial industry professionals). But as I’ve written elsewhere on this website, a good number of the provisions you will see are unique to the contracts of licensed healthcare practitioners. Such provisions address matters of licensing, privileges, credentialing, professional liability insurance, confidentiality of patients and others, peer review processes, ownership of patient records, call obligations, notice termination provisions, Stark Law and anti-kickback considerations, restrictive covenants tailored to the healthcare industry, and many others, including various matters of compensation, such as productivity incentive formulas based on wRVU production or percentages of collections, quality-metric-based bonuses, as well as recruiting and relocation agreements and loans often used for medical professionals.
Affordable physician contract reviews are available from a number of resources and my practice is just one (I review employment contracts for physicians in California, Washington, Oregon, and Montana, as those are the jurisdictions in which I am licensed to practice law). I have always worked with employment contacts throughout my long career as an employment lawyer, Over ten years ago, I wrote and published on the website I was using at the time an article discussing in specific terms Oregon physician contracts. I almost immediately began to receive queries from potential clients seeking review of their Oregon physician contracts. Subsequently, I added California physician contract reviews as I have been a member of the California bar for decades – including ten years representing employees in a wide variety of employment law cases in state and federal courts in San Francisco and next I naturally added Montana, where I was born and raised and where I first became a member of a state bar after graduating from Harvard Law School; and finally, after I gained admission to the Washington State Bar Association, I was able to round out my west coast bar membership + Montana. In sum, for quite a few years now I’ve been rather busily reviewing and advising physicians about their employment contracts and related matters (including independent contractor agreements as well).
Based on the above, you can readily discern that I am highly biased on the question. Nonetheless, sure, you should probably have an attorney review your first physician contract, or at least obtain a review from someone who has expertise in contract reviews in the state where you’ll be working.
But does it have to be an attorney?
Or can I just use AI?
The only authoritative point I can make about AI is that there is no reason to pretend that it doesn’t exist! Will some physicians seek the guidance of AI for their employment contract reviews? Yes. But why rely upon Artificial Intelligence when, for a modest fee, you can have not-Artificial Intelligence (and common sense to boot)?
I like to joke, of course, and the previous sentence was an example of the minor badinage of which I am fond. Which leads me to mention that, if you want to consider anecdotally AI’s ability to write humor, tell jokes, and so forth, you might find it illustrative to take a look at a thread on the topic such as can be found on social media sites from the past couple years. As you watch the commentary over just the past couple years, you will see the content evolving. You may see early on something akin to, ‘nah, AI can’t tell jokes,’ and then a bit later you may see, ‘it depends on what you mean by jokes,’ and then eventually, ‘here are some examples of AI-drafted jokes and they’re not bad.’
Take irony, for example, a mainstay of humor. In part, irony is when reasonable expectations are upset by reality, e.g. an auto mechanic’s car is poorly maintained or an interior decorator’s house is a mess. These types of ironic oppositions are something that AI can easily exploit. Indeed, if ‘Artificial Intelligence’ becomes the norm, in effect replacing not-Artificial Intelligence, that might be, when it comes to intelligence . . . a bit ironic.
Now that we’ve ventured sufficiently far afield, on a more serious note, when it comes to preparing an outline of key features in a document, AI can do that and almost instantly. For general outlines of concepts or various treatments or works on a given subject matter, for “compilations” if you will, whether of entire fields or discrete works within a field, AI excels. Yet . . . . And yet, still, observes the human compiling these words you’re reading, distinguishing a human from a machine is the ineffable nature of humans that one might describe, when it comes to intellect, as: contextual experience, hard-earned insight, nuance in the interstices of issues and affairs and workplaces, and creativity. Of these, contextual experience is possibly the most important characteristic of a contract review conducted by a human in comparison to an AI contract review. But they are all distinguishing characteristics of the not-Artificial Intelligence review of a physician contract.
And to make an inside joke with reference back to the homepage on this website, I’ll just say, I’d honestly rather engage with your uncle or your aunt who practice trusts and estates law than with AI. As a matter of fact, that isn’t even a joke!
In closing, I’ll also note that, thankfully, I don’t feel that my physician contract review services are in competition with AI. I’m not really competing with anyone. Indeed, as mentioned above and on the homepage of this website, your uncle who is a trusts and estates attorney may do just fine. On the other hand, if you’re looking for an attorney well-versed in contract law and licensed to work in the state where you’ll be practicing medicine, I’m always happy to help.
Yes, You Probably Should Have Your Employment Contract Reviewed
Finally, I would add here that the advice suggesting that you may benefit from having your employment contract reviewed prior to signing applies to any employment contract in any field of endeavor, unless you are yourself an attorney. And even then, there is the old saw that a man who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client. I rest my case.
Having said that, I offer, on either a flat rate or hourly fee basis, reviews of the following employment contracts:
- California Physician Contracts
- Oregon Physician Contracts
- Washington Physician Contracts
- Montana Physician Contracts
- Employment Contracts for Other Healthcare Practitioners in CA, OR, WA, and MT
Thank you for reading.
