Understanding Contracts: The Glue of Modern Business Relationships
Physicians and their practice managers frequently consider contracts to be overly burdensome, too detailed, and too expensive to create. Paradoxically, though, they similarly want assurances that when they do create a contract that it will be “iron-clad”. These are naïve misunderstandings of the enormous power and value that contracts have in the modern business environment. As physicians relate to others in a wide variety of ways, whether in employment, joint ventures, vendor relationships or otherwise, contracts define their business context. By the same token, a contract is only as good as the will of the parties to abide by it, so a clear and common understanding of the goals and intentions is essential. In “Understanding Contracts: The Glue of Modern Business Relationships”, elucidates with specific reference to typical physician relationships, those fundamental aspects of contracts that are often referred to as “boilerplate” or appear in the back of the document and are assumed not to be important. This is must reading for anyone who signs a contract no matter the purpose.