There are two main requirements for setting up your office email with your own domain name at an address like, “yourlawoffice.com.” First, you need to own the rights to the domain name. Second, you need to have a place to process your incoming and outgoing email. Once you have these aspects in place, you can migrate your current email to your new address.
In order to have an email address with “yourlawfirm.com” in it, you need to purchase the “yourlawfirm.com” portion. This aspect is really just ownership of the name. You aren’t buying any space on the internet at this point, just the right to the name. And in order to maintain the right to this name, you’ll have to renew your purchase periodically.
As you are selecting your name, keep in mind that there are many choices of what are called top-level domains (the .com portion of your domain name). For example, you can purchase a .legal, or .attorney top-level domain in addition to .net, .com, or even .coffee. We suggest you stick with the .com if you can, just for simplicity sake.
When purchasing these names, you’ll be buying the rights from an organization called a Registrar, and these can be purchased either on their own, or, many times, with an Email or Website Hosting account like Amazon Web Services, or Microsoft Office365, or Google G-Suite itself.
Once you own the rights to “yourlawfirm.com”, you will need to set-up an email server. You can set this up on your own server at your home or office (or in the cloud if you prefer), but, unless you have vast IT experience, it is generally advisable to have a third-party “host” your server on their equipment. They will set-up all of the security, spam-filtering, and other essentials of an email server for you.
Usually, when you set-up your email server, you’ll choose which type of provider you want to use (generally, just what you are most comfortable with). Most of us either use Microsoft Exchange (Outlook), or Google G-Suite (Gmail) as our preferred method for handling our email. Although there are other providers out there, we recommend that you make sure you choose one that allows for two-factor authentication for security purposes and has an acceptable privacy policy. You can read more on Email Providers in our Article Email Encryption.
Moving the email that you have at your current provider is generally possible by migrating your old email from that Server to your new one. Once you have set-up your new Email Host, and created all of the addresses that you need, you will connect the two servers and move all of the old email to their new corresponding addresses.
For the most part, this change will not be apparent or even really observable to outside parties. You may end up with some additional features that you can use in your new set-up, but receivers of your email will likely never know that you have fundamentally changed where your email is processed.
