Minds + Machines, the owner of the .law domain extension, started taking orders July 30, the beginning of a 60-day “sunrise period.” Firms who have registered their trademarks with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers— the nonprofit responsible for coordinating the monitoring and creation of naming conventions on the Internet—are eligible to participate in the sunrise period. Domain name registration will be available to credentialed members of the legal community Oct. 12.
More information on the .law launch program is available at http://nic.law. Minds + Machines has partnered with ALM Media to advertise and market the domains.
Lou Andreozzi—who is the CEO of .law, CEO of LexisNexis North American Legal Markets and the former chairman of Bloomberg Law—estimates the U.S. market is about 1.2 million attorneys, while the worldwide market approaches 2 million lawyers. Andreozzi said his goal in the next 12 to 24 months is to reach 10 percent market penetration, or roughly 100,000 .law sales.
The .law extension is the first major change to attorneys’ Internet handles since the beginning of the dot-com era. Attorneys who did not get the .com name they wanted because it might have already been taken have a new opportunity at Internet branding with the .law suffix. Andreozzi claims that adoption of the .law suffix will mean enhanced credibility for subscribers, because only credentialed lawyers can receive .law addresses, whereas anyone can apply for a .com address.
Andreozzi said the .law extension “creates a vertical community where you know that the person is actually an attorney. Some people will buy them offensively such as, for example, miamidivorce.law, while those with distinguished brands will buy them defensively so someone else doesn’t get the name.”
The standard annual renewal fee for a .law domain will be $200 and a $10 verification fee, says Andreozzi. The renewal fees for premium domain names and “certain super-premium names” have not yet been determined.
The .law domain is not the only law-related domain suffix which will soon be offered, according toearlier reporting. Other domains that will be coming available include .attorney, .esq and .lawyer. The new suffixes are the result of a long-term lobbying effort by ICANN,.
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