Klaus asked me to do this talk, which, you know, I'm not an attorney, I don't play one on TV, but I do have some experience in having filled out many contracts and asked people to sign contracts. The good part about this, two good parts, one is this is Klaus's talk, so I didn't have to write it, and two, he's already done a lot of the slides, so we can actually make up some time on this. So I did modify them a bit. So again, kind of in the millennial phase, I'll warn you, I have a lot of New Yorker cartoons, not because I think I'm funny, but I think the cartoons make me sound more interesting. But they also serve as kind of reminders to different points within the talk. So you might, was that about the, oh, that was the one with the cartoon with the dogs. Okay, so you can get back to that. But anyway, I'll read this very briefly, such a bummer, but it looks like I'll have to work for the next 30 or 40 years. Yes, you're going to have to work. I mean, there was this perception that you, you know, all your friends in the tech world, that you go in and you work for five years and you get the big payout, and then you, you know, at 35, you live the rest of your life. For most of us, we have to work, okay? So we'll get used to it, and we'll move through that. So doing these talks, you know, you pull up a lot of things, these boilerplate images from the internet, contracts, contracts, contracts, and then there's the, you know, the difficult pictures. And then there was one, contracts, apparently it's a movie. And this kind of, assassinate, eradicate, obliterate, okay? There is some element to this, but let's, we'll keep it on a milder tone. This again from the New Yorker, the ultimate contract, basically you're signing over everything you ever think or do. Some of these contracts are like this, and we'll get back to some of this, when you're signing away your intellectual, your intellectual rights for some ideas and things. A lot of us, especially academic programs, will ask you to sign over anything that you invent or come up with or innovate at work or off of work, so be really careful about that. My disclosures, I do get some money from industry, and I'm willing to take more if they'll offer it. So getting started, and this, again, some of this is rehashing things, but it speaks to how important it is to know what you want, okay? You can't go out there and look for the ideal thing if you don't know what it is that you're looking for. It doesn't, you don't have to know exactly what it is, but you will know pretty quickly what you don't want. And as we talked about a little bit yesterday, there's always tradeoffs, okay? So you want to make a list of the things that you think are important and prioritize them. Is it location? Do you really want to be in a coastal city? Do you want to be where your parents are? Do you not want to be where your parents are? What kind of size of a location, of a practice? What kind of income? Academic, non-academic, all these things. So if you can put these in a list and prioritize them, and then start thinking about what you're going to be willing to trade to get some of these things that are more important to you. And realize that there are a lot of different jobs out there, and that it's not what it was in the past. It's not academic versus, you know, three-person private practice. There's all these different shades in there, and they change over time, and you're not committed to, you're not locked into that one job necessarily for the rest of your life. You can change. It's easier to go from academics to private practice than the other way around, but it's not impossible. So you know, you've kind of figured things out. You're ready to go out there. You probably can't see the cartoon there, but the one spouse is saying to the other, sometimes I wish you had taken that job in New York. So yeah, you know, location is important. It certainly was for me. I didn't want to be where I grew up in New Jersey. I wanted to be somewhere where there were mountains, and wilderness, and fun things to do. So that became really important for me, and I was willing to trade a lot of different things to have an ideal location. For some people, it doesn't matter. A dark endoscopy suite is the same around the country, so it doesn't really matter, you know, if you're in, you know, Peoria or San Francisco. But know what you want. Take some interviews in places that you don't want. Try it out. Go to, I was telling some of the fellows that I went to an academic interview at the University of Florida. You know, no mountains, no skiing, nothing that I wanted. But I went there to kind of see what was going on and see if maybe there was a cultural fit. Maybe I was missing something. Maybe this is the greatest place in the world. You've got Disneyland. You've got all this. And no, it was absolutely awful. But I knew that, and it kind of reminded me that yes, my priorities, my focus was right. And then also, obviously, your family needs are important as well and how you're putting that all in. And then once you have that kind of big, you know, Venn diagram, how are you going to narrow it? Because you can't do 20 interviews. You can't do 30 interviews. You can do more on Zoom now that's now more socially acceptable and do as many of those as possible for that first round if you want to kind of clear things out or get some information about different groups or just practice your interviewing skills. But as Klaus mentioned, you know, the contacts are really important. Who can you talk to? How can you get the inside scoop? How can you know what this practice is all about? And that's not on their websites. That's not, you know, certainly in their advertisements. And when you go and interview, they're all in their best behavior anyway or they should be. So if things are going badly on that first interview and you get this kind of weird sense about somebody, you're going to better bet that, you know, a year into that job, that person is going to be weirder and weirder and more difficult to work with. So it's important to get that information. You can even do kind of, you know, sneaky things like cold call the office and see how the receptionist treats you. As Klaus mentioned, you know, hanging out in the waiting room and during the interview and talking to other patients. You know, do you like how you're treated? Are you getting good care? You know, say, I have this vague pain down here. What do you think they'll do for me? If they say, yeah, when I came in with a cough, I got a colonoscopy and an upper endoscopy. So you get a sense of where their priorities are. But also, you know, the important information is often not out there. So if you have a location that you want to go to, do your research. Look at it. See who's in that area and sense them and just cold call them and see if they're hiring or what their interests are. And you can send some CVs out. Even if they're not advertising for a job, you'd be surprised that sometimes that turns things around. Okay. We'll click through some of these. So Klaus already talked about some of the interviews, the basics of interviewing. And this is stuff that your parents hopefully have taught you. You know, being polite, being respectful, not coming out with the demands first, not saying what's the call schedule. In this cartoon, the guy doing the interviewing is saying, I see from your resume that you're a woman. Which reminds me to talk about the unique challenges and opportunities for female gastroenterologists. Every practice, certainly every private practice, wants more women in their practice. Okay. We learned yesterday that more than half of patients are female. Most of those patients would prefer to have a female gastroenterologist, yet fewer than 30% of gastroenterologists are women. So there's a huge need in practices for women. Plus, the flip side of that is some of these female patients are tougher. They have tougher anatomy. Their colonoscopies take longer. So the female gastroenterologists are in some ways penalized because they have a disproportionate number of female patients who take more time sometimes and are more difficult. So some of the savvier, older male gastroenterologists say, well, if we hire two more women, then I'll have all the easy colonoscopies to do, and they'll have the tough ones. That's kind of a jaundiced view of things. But female gastroenterologists do have kind of an edge in some of those interviewing environments to say, you know, I will offer your practice maybe something that you don't have. So any of those things that you have, you can leverage that to differentiate yourself from some of the other applicants. And I would say also that if there's something that you really want, there is that practice you definitely want to be in, and they've got five other applicants, and they can be pretty choosy, you know, what are you willing to do that would get you in there? Are you willing to take more call? You know, are you willing to make some sacrifices in the short term to differentiate yourself from the others and get yourself that second and third interview? Because we're really talking about, yeah, Klaus covered most of these, so I'll get through this. Culture is hugely important. You know, do the cultures fit? And if there's one thing that you're looking for is, are these people that I could work with for the long term? Do we have similar values? You might want to look at some of the partners' social media posts. Look at their Facebook pages. If they're walking around with an AK-47 on their weekend off, is that the kind of group you want to be in? Maybe it is, and then you'll be right at home. So understanding the environment is important. Who's paying things? Is the primary care group owned by the hospital? And is this private practice then going to lose access to all those primary care groups when the GI group is hired in-house? These are important things to know. What does it take to become a partner? When does that happen? And that will come up in some of the contract discussions in a bit. What's expected of you? Are they going to introduce you around, or are you on your own to go find referrals? That can be a big deal if you're starting out from scratch. Going from zero to 20 is sometimes a lot tougher than from 20 to 60. And this is a question I added to Klaus' slide. Think of this in this practice, this one question. What happens if screening colonoscopy goes away or is curtailed or changes dramatically because of a legislative change or a technological innovation? How is this practice going to handle this? Are you in a practice that has a fatal flaw? We don't want any situation to be dependent on one aspect that could change. Is there diversity? Is there hospital base? Is there IBD? Is there liver? Is there something else that you could do? So I throw this one in because, if you can't read this, this is the part of the job that I hate. You know, you're going to be doing a lot of the same things day in and day out. And if there's a part of that that you don't like, think real carefully about the job that you're getting into. I had an attending way back who admitted that he just didn't like sick people. But he was a great endoscopist, and he was a great teacher, and he was in academics, and he really liked hanging out with the fellows and teaching. So he kind of worked around this because he interacted with sick people indirectly through the house staff. And it was great, and he provided great care through that. But he recognized that there were parts of the job he didn't like. I personally, if I don't do another screening colonoscopy in my career, I'm OK. I don't need to do that every day. And if I found myself having to do screening colonoscopies for six hours a day every day, I would be like the sanitation workers here and not really liking my job. So knowing what you like and what you don't like before you go into it is really important. So you've gone through the first interview. You're kind of ready to commit. I'll read this one. I'm not supposed to say anything, but you really ace this first round of the interview process. It's tough. You get through the first one. Now you're going to start talking about contracts. Now you think that you know this group. This is where you want to be. Everything's kind of lining up. How do you do your due diligence as you're going into the contracting phase? As Klaus and others have said, an attorney becomes really important, or an accountant, or both, to kind of look at things, look at the financials, look at the small print on these contracts. My first, second job, way back at Virginia Mason with Klaus, they sent me a 10, 15-page contract. I was in New York at the time where nobody took anything at face value, and everybody had an attorney for everything. And in Seattle, nobody had an attorney. So you've got a contract, and if you liked it, you took it. And so my guy in New York said, you know, check this, cross this out, sign this, do this, and send it back. And I crossed some things out that I thought were unreasonable. And I got this call from Dick Kazarek, who was the chief of the department. He said, you crossed things out on the contract. What are you thinking? Well, I thought this was a negotiation, and this is how contracts work. In the intervening 25 years, things have changed, and there is this expectation that it is a back and forth. There are some things that are boilerplate that you can't change. But it is meant to be a discussion. It's like when you go to buy a car, they say, well, this Tesla is going to be $60,000. You don't just say, oh, good. Here's my $60,000. I'm going to drive it away. You go back and forth. And even if they're not going to budge on the $60,000, you get the floor mats, and you get the roof rack, and you get a different color, and you get some other things out of it, even if some parts of it aren't negotiable. And you can do the same thing with your job contract. So having the lawyer is really important, or somebody that you trust who knows what these things mean. Because there's a lot of the last contract I had, it was 50 pages. It was literally 50 pages. And to go through all that and not miss something is really challenging, even though I'd seen some of these before. Because once it's on paper, once you sign it, it's like your attorney says, oh, the medical record is a legal contract. Well, a contract is a legal contract. It is binding. That's why they do them. So it's important to know exactly what's going on before you sign it. So we'll go through some very basic terms. Again, this is not Contracts 101. This is just a very cursory outline of what you might expect in some of these contracts. So these are some of the terms that you'll see. This is kind of what they mean. And then, again, realizing that all these things are negotiations. There is back and forth. Understand that the practice wants something. They want, especially a bigger practice, they're going to want to standardize things. They want it simple. And they want to maximize what they get out of you. You're the individual. You recognize that the institution or the group wants these things. But you want certain things out of this. And so there is this back and forth. And what's negotiable and what's not depends on a lot of things and is different at every practice. So when they talk about term, it's kind of when you're starting and for how long. So here's a real opportunity. You're just coming out of, what, 10 years of training? When was the last time you had more than a week off and a break? At the end of next year or two years, whenever it is, there'll be a gap of time between when you finish your training and when you start. And yes, there'll be a gap in salary and all the rest. But it's going to kick in. And you're going to be paid a whole lot more than you're paid now. Most of these groups, especially if they're dying with patients waiting three or four months, they're going to say, oh, well, you finished your fellowship on June 30. Can you start July 5? I would say no. Take a gap. Take a couple of months. Do something fun. Do something with your family. Travel. Relax. You will never get that opportunity in a working environment, again, to take a big chunk of time unless you have a sabbatical or you change jobs. Most of these terms, though, they talk about how long you're employed. And these can be a lot of different things. A lot of these are one-year contracts. And they will kind of evergreen or it will continue if you don't have any negotiations and you're paid X and you'll be paid X the next year and they're kind of renewable forever. Most of us will say that this is a one-year contract and we're going to have to renegotiate a year from now. So it's important to know that and what you want. If you're signing a contract for employment, you want it to be of a longer term. You don't want it to kind of time out after a year or some set time unless you have a good guarantee that your position will continue after that. Getting things in email that may not be on the contract are really important if it becomes a negotiating point in the future. They say, oh, we never said that. We said, well, this email kind of said that you did say that I can have every Thursday and Friday off. Unlikely. And so when they talk about term, it also means termination. As a cartoon, let's face it, this organization has never been a good fit for you. Sometimes that only becomes clear after a year or two. And every contract has termination clauses. And these are pretty narrowly defined, usually for cause and not for cause. I won't spend too much time on cause because these are things you should avoid. You shouldn't do drugs while you're at work. You shouldn't harass people. You should be a good citizen. And every one of these contracts has termination clauses. You want them as specific as possible. You don't want things like moral turpitude because that can be different in San Francisco and Iowa. But they're usually pretty well defined. If you lose your ability to bill for Medicare, if you are convicted of a felony, things like that. And read those. Those are not usually very negotiable. The termination without cause is highly variable, and that works both ways. Most of these employment contracts have an out clause where the practice can fire you or let you go with 90 days notice, or 60 days, or 180 days. That is pretty common. But that also gives you an out as well. If you don't like the practice, you can leave without necessarily owing them things if it's clearly defined in the contract. You do want to do a couple things with this, though, especially early on. If there's going to be termination without cause, you want it to be as long as possible. You want them on the hook to pay you. If they're going to say, look, our referral's dried up. We don't need your services anymore. Then you've got to go look for something else. You want them to pay you for that time and the commitment that you've made to that group and moving there and setting up shop and bringing your family and all the rest. So you want that as long as possible. But at the same time, like the group, you don't want to be tied in to things, especially if you haven't become a partner. So your ability to leave, to terminate on your side, should be as short as makes sense. If you get a better job or you want to go somewhere else, you shouldn't have to hang around for six months, although some of these contracts will insist on that. Those are usually areas that you have some leeway with that you can negotiate around. The other part of this, and I think this is assignability, is different than termination. This is what happens if the group is bought or collapses or goes into bankruptcy. Or now, much more commonly, if this is a private group, what happens if they sell out to a bigger entity, if they merge with the 500 physician group in Texas, or if Bain Capital comes in and offers all the partners $2 million apiece to sell the practice? What happens to you as the new employee? Are you left kind of holding the bag because you're not a partner? That can be addressed in the contract. And especially now, you want to make sure that this assignability is as much in your favor as possible. If you're looking at a group and it's a partnership and it's a three-year partnership deal, what's the chance that that practice is going to get sold in a year and a half? You can ask for things in that contract such that you can put in wording that says, if this practice is sold before I become partner, I would like to be, if it's after six months, immediately move to partnership status so that I have some equity in this sale. And I think there would be a reasonable expectation if you're joining a group and looking at a partnership track. If they come back and say, well, we can't do that, that's a red flag that maybe they're already talking about selling the practice. And they don't want to have to divide that pie up with a new partner and that they're really kind of thinking that we need some worker bees in here so after we sell it, we're going to still work for a salary but have no equity in the group. So assignability is something to pay attention to, especially in some of these smaller group practices. Insurance. You're all covered by the universities and training programs right now. But as we all know, malpractice insurance is expensive. And there is something called a tail. So if you leave after working for a year, what happens if that perforation that happened at six months decides to sue the practice, sue you, six months after you leave? They have either a, they generally have a, it varies from state to state, but usually about two years to file that lawsuit. So if your malpractice insurance has expired after you leave the practice, you would be liable for whatever those damages were. So most malpractice insurance and other practices would insist that you pay on a monthly basis for a tail that would cover anything that you did in the practice for up to two years or so after you leave that practice. And you want that practice to pay for that tail. And you want to get that in your contract because it can get costly. And especially if they terminate you for some other reason other than cause, you don't want to be left holding the bag for that expensive tail coverage. Now, a lot of these contracts will say that if you get convicted of a felony, you lose, the practice doesn't have to pay for your tail, which there's no good way of getting out of. You can try and fix that. But unless you're planning on getting convicted of a felony, you probably don't have to worry about that aspect of the contract too much. This one, sorry, Mr. Bond, but you just can't leave Comcast. I put that in because there are some of these restrictions in the contracts. And these are the restrictive covenants and non-solicitation causes that are written into a lot of these. Now, this varies state to state. Some restrictive covenants are ironclad. State of Washington, you sign a restrictive covenant, you're not going to win trying to fight that. And you have to kind of not practice in the area for the allotted amount of time. California, they're not very enforceable. And so most practices don't even have them. But it varies state to state. But even in states where it's not very enforceable, these practices take them very seriously. They don't want to hire you for three or four years and then have you go next door, set up shop, and take all the patients that you've gotten to know over the past three or four years out of their practice and compete against them. So even if it's not very enforceable, they can make it very expensive for you and difficult to leave their group. So making sure you know what those restrictions are and what the state laws are is really important. And get it on your contract to be as narrow as possible for the shortest amount of time for the shortest or the smallest distance from the practice. So it'll usually be 10 miles or 20 miles, which you can sometimes work around 50 miles or 100 miles or the same state. That's a lot broader than anybody should have to deal with. And these are negotiable for the most part. Yeah, upset at breaching your non-compete? Of course not. People, they hate this. And I've seen multimillion dollar lawsuits go on between dissolving groups and group members. Duties, so what's expected of you. And that's usually outlined in the contract. And that can either be important or not so important. As this cartoon is saying, all work and no play makes you a valued employee. Every business wants to get the most out of you as possible. And it's no different than a group practice. Yes, they want you to be healthy and well-balanced and mentally stable. But the practice managers want to get some work out of you. That's why they're hiring you, to get the job done. And those duties will be outlined in the contract. And it varies. So if the compensation is mostly productivity-based, the duties that say you'll work a minimum of 35 patient-facing hours a week are less important. You'll probably blow through that, and your compensation will be built around how much extra you're doing. But if you're in a Kaiser or an academic setting, they can take this pretty seriously. And they say, well, from your Epic notes, we can tell that you were only there for 34 and 1 half hours. And you need to be on site, and you need to do x, y, and z. And you need to see this many more patients. So really know what they're asking for a 1.0 FTE. And if you want to work less than 1.0, make sure that that has been reduced proportionally in your contract, and that you're not being penalized excessively. And it's more and more common and more and more acceptable to ask for less than a 1.0 FTE. So make sure that's well-defined and that you look at that. Outside activities, also very important. It may not seem important now, because you just want the job. And you're like, I only want one job. I don't want two jobs. I don't want three jobs. I just want to do this job. A lot of contracts will say that you can't work outside of that group. And that should be defined. Can you work in a community health clinic on your free time, because it's a service you want to provide? Can you give talks? What happens with the honoraria that you get from talks or work with industry? What happens to your intellectual property if you come up with a great new polypectomy device? In a lot of academic practices, and I said I would talk about this, those contracts will say that the institution owns everything that you invent. And my first job, I signed the contract. And I only looked later when I had some intellectual property. And it turned out that the institution could come after everything that I was getting in royalties. And they don't always do this, but the academic institutions often will. So if you're thinking in that department, even if you're not, make sure that you look at those provisions about what you can do outside of your work time and how much ownership the contract wants to put on that. And you should try and make that as narrow as possible, because certainly my feeling is that your time outside of work is your time. And if you want to write the great American novel about health care, you shouldn't have to pay your institution for giving you the experience of how miserable it is to work in that institution. Most contracts will talk about disclosures, and there's not a good way around this. The Sunshine Act will report essentially anything that you make outside of your job, and anybody can look at that. We used to think that, oh, you're going to be on the front page of the paper if you make money from industry or something like that. Nobody really cares about it that much, as long as you're disclosing that in all the right environments. But that will probably be on your contract as well. So finally, we get to things like salary and compensation. And those will be well-defined in the contract. But you need to understand kind of what the contract actually says about your salary. Is it just salary, or is it salary plus bonus? Is it salary plus productivity? Are there kind of non-productivity elements to it in terms of outside work with committees? Or is everything like Joe's magic group, where it's Sweden and everything is divided up equally? And it should say that in the contract, and it should be well spelled out. And you're going to be looking at that. And you may have some ability in a smaller group to tweak that. If you think you're going to be very productive, you've got a bunch of loans to pay off, your mother-in-law wants to live next door, and you're going to buy that house, and your spouse has expensive habits, and you want to make a lot of money, then you may want to trade off some element of that base salary for productivity bonus and say, look, this is the base salary I'll accept, but I want more per RVU, something like that. All those things are potentially negotiable. But understanding what the incentives are and the bonus packages, and especially partnership track, are important in those contracts. Partnership track, most of the private practices, the traditional ones, the big piece of this is what it takes to become a partner. And you really want to understand that. Are you paying up front? Are you paying in terms of a lower salary for two or three years to become a partner? Who's making those decisions about whether and when you become partner? And you want that outlined as clearly as possible. And there are clear benefits to being a partner, because in a lot of these groups, that's where most of the money is distributed, through the partnership. And then there's equity if the practice is sold. And that can be a big lump sum payment, especially now as a lot of these are being absorbed or sold. And then there are voting rights, and then there's leadership opportunities within that group. You want to be equal to the people that you're working with. But there's also liability that goes with partnership. If they bought a new building, and it turns out it's a disaster, and it's in violation of code, and there are all these lawsuits about it, you're potentially liable for everything that the practice does. If there are lawsuits for harassment within the group or malpractice, you are potentially on the hook for those costs, as well, as a partner. And ultimately, if there's fraud going on, you could be criminally liable for things that happen in your practice. So you really want to be very careful about who you're hooking up with. I won't go through too much with the malpractice claims. It's usually outlined in there, and there are base expectations. And most groups will have wording around what is expected and how that's paid for. Some of the things, though, that are negotiable are some of the perks that you get, the health insurance, the dental insurance, things like that. Does the practice pay for that? Are you being expected to pay for it out of part of your compensation? You want to get those things paid for out of pre-tax dollars, and most contracts will have that outlined in there. It's very variable about what other things they'll offer, life insurance, disability insurance, but you have some degree of negotiation ability around those things. The retirement plans are really important to understand. There are different ways of taking money from your salary or from your productivity comp and kind of squirreling it away in potentially pre-tax dollars. If it's a nonprofit, you have different opportunities and different plans that you can put money into pre-tax. There are these cash balance plans that a lot of groups use for highly compensated individuals to take bigger chunks of money, usually on a three-year basis. And putting that aside in pre-tax investments, that can be very valuable. Understanding how these things work is really important. The other part of that, and this is just a little editorialization, if you can, for financial stability, I remember one of my old attendings saying, the secret to financial happiness, one wife, one house. And of course, he had three houses and three previous marriages. But part of financial success is living below your means. So you've all learned to live like fellows now. That's as cheap as you're going to live for a long time. Eating that last piece of pizza in the box that's been around since yesterday. Not buying a lot of new things you don't need. If you can avoid the urge to buy the new Tesla with your first paycheck, upgrading the house to something larger, and living just a little bit below your means, more like a fellow, and put some of that money away early in investments and retirement packages, you will see that start ballooning a lot faster than trying to play catch-up at 45 or 50. Other things that you can negotiate. Paid time off, CME time, are often very negotiable in different contracts, especially if you're in the driver's seat and they really want you. Maternity and family leave. There are laws in different states that will specify how much time you can take off. But sometimes they only apply to larger businesses. So be careful about those and make sure you know what the maternity and family leave options are with your group. Especially, unfortunately, and it is unfair, but the female partners often get kind of tagged with this. You're going to be doing child care for part of the time. Oh, now we're going to throw in all these additional responsibilities. And you can just juggle it because you're tough and you'll figure it out. Make sure that there is protected time for that and that it's in the contract. Minor stuff. All these things. This is like when you buy the car and you want the floor mats and you want the roof rack a lot of these things can be kind of tagged in. And you don't want to be greedy about this, but once they've said that they want you and you want them, you can kind of tweak some of these things in the contract and kind of up that a little bit, especially loan repayment if you can get some of that worked in there. Relocation bonuses can be really helpful. And that can be $10,000, $20,000. Is there a signing bonus? Some of these places may have something like that available. And make sure that if one practice is offering you a signing bonus of $30,000 and another one isn't, say, hey, this group's offering me a signing bonus. What are you coming to the table with? Don't say it like that. But you'd be surprised that all they can say usually at that point is no. And then you don't ask, you don't get it. So what are the other resources? Sample contracts. Ask these groups. Even at the first interview, said, hey, this went really well. Is it too soon to ask what one of your contracts would look like? You can get that feel from the interview, whether that's too much to ask or maybe it's completely appropriate. Get from your friends. Ask them what their contracts look like. Have them photocopy it, send it to you, and then kind of look it over and see how that compares to the one that you're looking at. There are a bunch of these on the web. ACP has an employment contract guide. Again, this is a couple of years old, but it's on the web. There are some books out there. I don't know this one myself, but this is what Klaus recommended. It's worth taking a look at. And then finally, this guy, the one guy just leaning over saying, wow, your last job sounds terrible. You're not locked into any of this. Just remember that you're going through this process. It's not the end of the world if it's not a perfect fit. There are other jobs out there you can always change. And with that, I'll stop, take any questions, or if we are taking a break now, we'll pick this up later. Thanks a lot, Drew. Let's take a question. Let's do this. We have time for one or two quick questions. Then we're going to take a 10-minute break. I don't want to take time away from the break, because again, our industry partners are out there. And I would like for all of us to thank them to go and see what they are exhibiting. Then we'll do one more talk before the lunch break. And Joe, with your permission, we're going to move your talk to right after the lunch break. Does that work? Absolutely not. OK, we'll negotiate that. Very good. We have time for one or two quick questions. Go ahead. Dr. Thurman, thank you so much for a great talk. One of the questions I wanted to ask you was if you could expand more on your slide about the signability. So if, let's say, a group does come, when you initially talk to a group, they don't mention that you asked that specific question. Who knows, two years, three years down the road. What is, and you aptly pointed out that dual-edge sort of, if you said there is no signability, then you'll have to do another contract. So what is a really win-win type of situation there? How do you best protect yourself? So yeah, you don't want to be dropped, OK? Because you're in a vulnerable position. You're the new employee. You want a provision in there that says, if they join another group, that your job will be protected and that you will be assigned to the new group, essentially, in your same capacity. And that protects you from some of those changes. And that's just with mergers and things like that. That doesn't kind of cover what happens if there's a big payout, OK, or if they sell the group. That's a whole different discussion. And that probably would not be covered by assignability. It would say, sure, yeah, you can, you know, Bain Capital owns a group now. Yeah, we'll take you on, same salary. Oh, but there's no equity and there's no partnership. So you want assignability there and then all the other elements you want to work out. We'll take one last question. You had your, one of you had your hands up. I'm sorry, go ahead. I was just wondering about the non-compete. Maybe this is one of those things that's not going to change. Probably in the next couple of years. But with Biden talking to the World Trade Commission about, like, trying to get rid of the non-compete and that it's against, you know, the spirit of capitalism and competition and everything. Do you actually foresee that playing out boots on the ground in terms of our negotiation contracts? Not in the foreseeable future. People love those. And the people in power are the ones, you know, who keep those in place. So you're not going to see people voluntarily giving up the idea of non-competes. It might happen. Again, some states are different. But yeah, they take them pretty seriously. And the best you can often do, if, okay, so if you're unique and you're offering a valuable service and you're the one who's coming into that community with IBD that nobody else is doing, you can say, look, I'm not going to sign this non-compete. Do you still want me? And if you want to play that game, you can. And some, you know, there's nothing legally that says that they have to have a non-compete in there. And in fact, when Klaus and I were at Virginia Mason, there was no, you know, they were so confident of how great a place it was to work that there was no restrictive covenant in the contracts when we signed them. After we left, it is now part of their contract. So they don't like people going across the street and starting a new practice. Boy, were they wrong. The two PDFs that are listed in the reference slide, I find very helpful resources. So download those and take a look at them. Why don't we thank you again, Drew. We'll take a 10-minute break and then reconvene. Thank you.

employment contract

negotiation points

term and termination clauses

insurance coverage

compensation

restrictive covenants

benefits

physicians