I am a pediatric surgeon in a busy and successful private practice.

A few years ago we were approached by our hospital administration to merge with another local group as employees of the hospital. We were leery but interested in growing so we engaged with our doctor friends and our hospital to try and make this work.

It is only when we were presented with an “emergent nonbinding agreement” in which all the previously eliminated poison pills were produced as an integral part of our contract, that we realized we were being played.

I remembered a lecture Mr Bond gave at the ACS meeting in San Francisco (standing room only) and sought him out.

He extricated us from a very bad deal after we called him at the very last minute, renegotiated our contracts and saved our practice.

This took time and surgeons are not patient, he was excellent in helping us work through our own frustrations. The price tag is commensurate to the task but he essentially paid for himself with the renegotiated fees and gave us all a raise as well.

I cannot recommend Mr Bond enthusiastically enough. In an era when we consult specialists more and more in the field we all work in, it seems suicidal for doctors to try and negotiate their own contracts in a field we cannot compete in; if nothing else, we have jobs to attend to while administrators can plan and confabulate all day.