Law Times

Page 2 February 9, 2015 • Law Times www.lawtimesnews.com NEWS Dot-lawyer domains get cool reception Statistics show just 398 registrations by Canadian practitioners By Julius Melnitzer For Law Times ust 398 Canadian lawyers and law firms have registered for the new dot-lawyer top-level domain name since it became generally available in October 2014. "Most lawyers are not aware of the availability and implications of the new [top-level domains], but they bloody well should be because these new domains are going to become authoritative," says Pe- ter LaMantia of Toronto, chief executive officer of Authentic Web Inc., a brand- registry asset management firm. "My belief is that Internet content will reorder on this basis." Compared to the United States, the Canadian numbers are even less impres- sive. As of Feb. 4, the 398 Canadian reg- istrations made up less than one-half of one per cent of the 100,000 or so lawyers in Canada. By the same date, the United States had registered some 6,162 dot-lawyer domains. That amounts to 77 per cent of the 9,290 registrations worldwide and accounts for about five per cent of the 1.2 million lawyers in the United States. The discrepancy becomes even greater given that the United States also has 4,947 registrations for the dot-attorney domain name. Canada has only 77, which is un- derstandable from the perspective that the term attorney isn't in common usage here. But given the volume of cross-border business, it seems reason- able to suggest Canadian practitioners might seek to attract Americans familiar with the attorney designation. At first blush, Canada is embrac- ing the new domains more than other English-speaking common law jurisdic- tions. Britain has but 369 registrations, although the primacy of the barrister and solicitor nomenclature there may have something to do with that. For its part, Australia has 218 registra- tions representing about one-third of one per cent of the lawyer population. What's of interest about Britain, how- ever, is the fact that that country's lawyers have 175 registrations for the dot-attorney domain, a number that compares favour- ably with the statistics for dot-lawyer. But that's not to say that a dot-lawyer domain is worthwhile for everyone even at the cost of $36 annually per domain name. "The question that lawyers, especially small firms and sole practitioners, have to ask themselves is whether digital ex- posure is important in the sense that they are accessing that world in order to at- tract more clients," says LaMantia. If they are, using the new top-level domains can be extremely effective, says Matt Godson, chief executive officer of Momentum Event Group in New York, an events organizer that's also a reseller of the dot-lawyer domain. "It's very compelling for a private prac- titioner to have his name as his brand," he says. While the dot-com domain name has a certain prestige, what it lacks is specific- ity. Smith.com, for example, is less infor- mative than smith.lawyer. "The dot-lawyer designation is more memorable and more effective because it is tied to areas of interest and lines of business," says LaMantia. "It will take some time, however, be- fore content on the Internet reorders in this way." Godson says the new top-level domain names are most effective when paired with a premium second-level name such as litigation-dot-lawyer, cityname-dot- lawyer or even citynamelitigation-dot- lawyer. "The premium names are affordable and make a lot of sense because they are good signals for search engines and speak to a particular sector," he says. "People who are searching for a lawyer tend to be looking for a local practitioner with a specific area of expertise." But at least in the United States, larger law firms aren't ignoring the new domain names. "Some of the large firms are snapping up domains like contracts or white collar as a way of highlighting practice areas," says Godson. "But when you're talking about prac- tice areas, you're also talking five-figure prices." Kim von Arx, a lawyer at Cognition LLP in Toronto and former general coun- sel of the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, says there's another important reason why lawyers should make an ef- fort to inform themselves about top-level domains. "Eventually, all the top business brands in many industries will have their own top-level domain names," says von Arx. "The implications of that development is one of the biggest things in this arena about which lawyers are failing to advise their clients." LT Untitled-2 1 2015-02-03 2:39 PM J 'Eventually, all the top business brands in many indus- tries will have their own top-level domain names,' says Kim von Arx.

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