.law web domain to be made available to legal sector

A new web domain exclusively for the legal sector is accepting applications of interest.

The “.law” domain will be available to law firms, legal publishers, bar associations and law societies for $200 a year (£135) reports Legal Futures.

Lou Andreozzi (pictured), chief executive of .law, said the company would like to begin selling the addresses from September and they would be auctioned if there was interest from more than one party for the same domain.

Mr Andreozzi said: “You must be a lawyer to register for a site.

“A lot of sites are set up to look as if the people involved are lawyers when they are in fact phishing sites.

“In this case, the lawyers’ credentials are checked prior to them getting hold of the site. This creates a much more trustworthy community. If we find out someone is not a lawyer, we will take the name back.

“We can’t guarantee 100% of the sites are not bought for someone else, but security is exponentially higher than other domains.”

Mr Andreozzi said the process for verifying applicants was still under development but would conform to records kept by law societies and directories.

The company is owned by the Dublin-based Minds + Machines, which announced earlier this month that it had been granted the exclusive license to control the .law domain by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

Mr Andreozzi, a former chairman of Bloomberg Law and CEO of LexisNexis North American Legal Markets.

He said: “We believe the current registration process was created with dot-coms in mind.

“Many people did not know what URLs were, and they were left out of the right names or saw them bought by entities which buy and resell them. This enables everyone to get the right name.”

He added that the bulk of the names would be offered $200 per year but that there would also be premium rates for names like “London.law”.

Mr Andreozzi said: “People are already lining up at the door,” he said. “They believe this is something in their best interest. They’re very excited at the prospect of an exclusive legal community on the internet.”