Your first attending contract will arrive before you finish residency. You will be excited. You will skim it for the salary, the signing bonus, and the start date, and then forward it to a contract lawyer.
That is the wrong order.
The first read should happen alone, slowly, before a lawyer sees it. The lawyer's job is to translate the legalese — yours is to know what you actually care about: how the practice handles 11pm calls in year three, whether your spouse can find work in the town this contract anchors you to, whether the partnership track is a promise or a wish.
Here is what to flag on the first pass. Not what to fix — what to circle and bring up in conversation. Some are standard boilerplate. Some are the most important clauses in the document.
Termination. How you can be let go, and how you can leave. Look for the without-cause notice period (90 days is common; 30 is short) and what counts as "for cause" (vague language is a flag). Without-cause termination is the door you may want to walk out of in three years.
The restrictive covenant. Two questions: how far does it reach, and how long does it last? "10 miles, 12 months" sounds tame until you realize 10 miles is the entire city you live in. Enforceability varies state by state. You do not want to be the test case.
Tail coverage. If your malpractice policy is claims-made, you are exposed for incidents that happened during employment but get reported after you leave. Tail coverage closes that gap and it is expensive. The contract specifies who pays: you, the employer, or it depends on how you leave. The "depends" version is the one to read carefully.
Compensation structure. Base salary plus productivity is the common shape. Look for the sign-on bonus clawback (how long you have to stay before the bonus is yours to keep), how long the base salary holds before you are on full productivity, and the productivity threshold above which the variable portion starts. Compare against the MGMA median for your specialty — that's the curve the contract was designed around.
When you finish this pass, you will have a list of questions. Take that list to the lawyer. The lawyer earns their fee on what you miss. The questions come from you.
Read it like you mean it.