What are 5 potential mistakes with dental employment contracts? Owning your own dental practice is a lot of work, but it’s also very rewarding. Whether you’re a first-time dental practice owner or someone who’s been in the business awhile, it’s important that you understand how to craft a dental employment contract for your employees. If you’re ready to hire employees, then you need to know what mistakes to avoid when writing up contracts for your future employees. At Brenden Kelley Law, we want to make this process a little bit easier for you, so we’ve compiled some information about dental employment contracts and a list of dental employment contract mistakes that you should avoid.

Top 5 Mistakes Dental Practice Owners Make When Writing Up Contracts

Not Specifying Whether Your New Hire Is an Employee or an Independent Contractor

Despite the overuse of the word ’employee,’ the term refers to a very specific kind of worker at your practice. To be an employee means that you are paid a certain way to comply with tax laws and that you are bound to a certain set of rules. These are based on the conditions laid out in your contract.

Oftentimes, practices are looking to hire employees to work for them—whether they work full-time or part-time. However, there are some instances where employers will want to hire independent contractors. These are employees who are usually paid via 1099s. You need to lay out whether the new hire is an employee or an independent contractor in their contract.

Leaving Out Termination Information

Do not assume that every person you employ will leave your practice amicably. As such, you must think about what constitutes termination, and how your employees should behave after they’re terminated. In each employment contract, specify what sorts of actions can lead to termination.

In addition, put parameters on what the relationship can look like between employer and employee after the employee reaches termination. You don’t want former employees trespassing or taking patients and staff with them.

Forgetting to Include a Non-Solicitation Clause

This mistake happens frequently, and it can be detrimental to the health of your practice. Dentists, office managers, dental hygienists, cleaning staff, and other employees are all crucial to the success of your practice. So, if one of your dentists leaves the practice to open their own, and decides to take two other dentists, an office manager, and half your hygienists and cleaning staff, your practice will suffer.

To avoid people from your practice soliciting your staff after leaving the job, ensure that you put a non-solicitation clause in your dental employment contacts. A non-solicitation clause will also ensure that people from your practice do not take your patients with them to their new practice.

Being Vague With the Descriptions of the Employee’s Duties

To ensure that your employees are complying with the standards correspondent with their roles, you need to be very descriptive when you’re outlining their duties in each contract. If you are vague with what you expect of your new employees, you risk having negligent employees, and, even worse, you’ll have no grounds to take action on negligent employees. It’s always better to be thorough when listing duties, as opposed to vague.

Not Mentioning Information About Liquidated Damages

Including a liquidated damages clause ensures that you’ll have enough compensation for any breach of contract. However, what is special about a liquidated damages clause is that it doesn’t require the employee to prove their damages.

If you have a liquidated damages clause and your employee goes against your contract, however, they do so, they will have to pay you a certain amount of money for a certain amount of time, depending on what is in your contract.

Don’t Put Your Dental Practice at Risk, Reach out to Brenden Kelley Law Today

We hope you learned a lot regarding dental employment contracts. We have gone over some information about dental employee contracts and five different mistakes that uninformed dental practice owners often make when they are writing up contracts for new employees. Even with the information you’ve just been presented, it is helpful to have a professional help you draft your contracts. So, if you want to protect yourself, reach out to Brenden Kelley Law, and we can help you determine what’s best to include in your dental contracts.