Physician Contract Glossary · Contract Structure
Letter Agreements
A letter agreement is a shorter, less formal document that can still bind you to real obligations.
A letter agreement is a streamlined contract, often used for locums, short engagements, or to lock in terms before a full agreement is drafted. Shorter does not mean safer. A letter agreement can still bind you to compensation terms, restrictive covenants, and termination conditions, and its brevity sometimes means key protections are simply missing rather than negotiated.
Do not treat a letter agreement as informal. Read it with the same scrutiny as a full contract, and notice what is absent, because missing terms default to whatever the law or the employer's interpretation supplies.
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