Jim Calloway recently had a post on avoiding self-inflicted wounds, which included commenting on a twitter post that “if your lawyer’s email address ends in hotmail.com, gmail.com or yahoo.com (or aol.com) find a new lawyer.”
While the comment is a bit extreme if taken as an absolute rule, there is a valid underlying point here. Teenagers today expect people to have a Facebook account, and clients expect law firms to have a website. Especially for a small firm or solo, a web site tells the public that the firm actually exists. It validates the firm to the public at large. In addition, although this is a separate point, the content of a web site leads prospective clients to form a (hopefully positive) impression of the lawyer and the firm: “They’ve been successful,” “They’ve got a lot of useful information,” “They do exactly what I need.”
By extension, an email address serves to identify the sender as a member of a firm and not “[email protected].” For example, when I get an email from someone, I routinely look up the web site that is the extension of the email. For an email of [email protected], the web site will be www.heckmanco.com. The bottom line is that in this day and age, not using a business-oriented email address as the main email to clients is unprofessional and counterproductive in terms of client relations.
Now of course most people ALSO have a gmail or other account that they use for specific purposes: listservs, ebay, personal email, etc. But that just reinforces the point: use a personal account for personal email; use a professional account linked to the firm’s web site for business email.
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