Today’s the day. Dot LAW (.law) is released. Should you run out and spend $200+ to reserve your firm’s spot? Guest poster Igor Ilyinsky breaks it down for us.
- The firm name as registered with your regulator (state bar in the US).
- The official name of your regulator (e.g., The State Bar of Texas) –
- The year of registration with your regulator.
- The license number of your registration with your regulator.
- The jurisdiction of your regulator (Country plus state, province, and/or district, as applicable).
So there’s a lot of work to be done if you want to get in on the ground floor. But be wary of anyone selling “pre-registrations” as only the companies on the list are accredited to register for you – and there is no such thing as pre-registration. If you’re still on the fence, here are some tips I give our clients:
- Firms that are very concerned about their brand identity being hijacked should consider reserving all the possible domain names. That’s a very small number of law firms; and if a group truly has to be validated as a lawfirm to purchase a .law domain, there should be even less cause for worry, since hijackers are rarely other firms. At worst you will be competing against a firm with a similar name. On the other hand, if it turns out that the validation is weak, then it’s likely that the new gTLD will never gain traction.
- Unlike the other legal related gTLDs “.law” is short, and many firms can shorten their domains with a “.law” or they may prefer it over a “.net” or something with a hyphen. So if your firm settled on “jones-lawyers.net” because everything else was taken, it might behoove you to try for jones.law. Otherwise, there’s no benefit to users recognizing and remembering your domain.
- The general public is not informed about these specific gTLDs and they may take a long time to gain traction. Remember, gTLDs have been around in other industries for almost a decade, yet no one uses them due to the confusion they cause. Legal could be different, but only if the validation becomes a strong factor.
- Google is known to ignore what are called EMDs (exact match domains) which implies that they won’t give any bonus points to keywords in the TLD. So don’t expect your site to fly to the top of the top of Google searches. But again, we don’t know if the TLDs actually become validations that a law firm is real and reputable, in which case Google may reconsider. So far, none of the popular TLDs are quite that authoritative.
About Igor Ilyinsky. Igor is a Marketing Technologist, Entrepreneur and entertaining presenter focused on advancing Law Firms and Companies to the highest level of marketing technology automation. He is the founder of FirmWise where he helps law firms market online.