I'm assuming this is a partnership-track position. If not, the specifics of the job don't matter as much because you will not be there long, anyway.
First you need to assess your prospective partners. Can you work with these people for the long haul? It is not like putting up with repellent students or residents for a specified limited number of years. Partnerships are longterm relationships, and you need to determine whether the relationship is worth investing in. Partners you get along well with will not necessarily make up for other job deficiencies, but a malignant work environment cannot be offset by other factors, at least not longterm. Do not take a job with people you do not trust, no matter how good it looks or how desperate you are. If the group recently lost a prospective or established partner to anything besides death or retirement, find out why and move heaven and earth to talk to him or her. Even if he/she is a jerk, you will find out information you can't get from anywhere else.
Group structures and buy-ins vary, but the key is a basic sense of fairness, or at least an attempt at it, in terms of work and compensation. In general, you'll find senior partners will always take at least some liberties they feel are due to their station, but if you can convince yourself that they are really minding the business side, that's okay. Large disparities in workload and compensation across partners are a red flag, however. They will not improve over time. Three years is plenty to make partner. Longer periods of servitude demand an explanation.
Where are your specimens coming from? Back in the day, a large locked-in referral base such as your hospital was enough. Nowadays, it's important that a potential group is actively seeking increased volume from a variety of sources. Is the group's volume growing steadily? How is group responding to economic pressures?
Pathologists just getting started tend to fetishize trivial stuff, like benefits during their indentured servitude period and current workload specifics, but they don't realize that that stuff means zilch after you make partner. Ditto job contracts, which are only useful if the relationship ends. You need to think longterm and assess where this group will be in five, ten, fifteen years, not how many CME trips you get the first year. How much do partners make for doing what, period.
