A Retirement Guide To Your Law Firm’s Website and Online Presence

In our over 20 years in business, The Modern Firm has helped nearly two thousand clients establish and enhance their online presence. As we’ve continued our relationships with many of those clients, a different need has begun to emerge: how to wind down that presence as attorneys step away from practice and into retirement.

An attorney’s website may be the centerpiece of their online presence, but attorneys these days have multiple digital assets, extending beyond their websites to email accounts, professional profiles, and increasingly, social media. It’s important to devote attention to properly closing down those assets so that problems like identity theft don’t gather like storm clouds and rain on your well-earned retirement. 

Of course, retirement isn’t the only reason a law practice shuts its doors. Attorneys may sell their practice; merge their practice with that of another firm; divide the practice into separate firms; or simply take new jobs elsewhere. Each of those scenarios requires a unique strategy. In this post, we address the particular needs of attorneys who are retiring. 

What Digital Assets Should Retiring Attorneys Think About?

With all the real-life implications of shutting down a law office, it’s easy to overlook potential pitfalls in the digital world. But that doesn’t mean they’re any less real. Here’s a short list of the public-facing digital assets lawyers should consider when retiring:

• Domain names (.com, .net, or .law)
• Websites
• Email accounts
• Business listings on Google, Yelp, and dozens of other directories and databases
• Social media profiles on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, X, Bluesky and more
• Professional profiles on Avvo, Martindale, Lawyers.com, and others

Why is it so important to shut down your law firm’s digital presence? There are two primary reasons, and you may not have even considered the first: 

• You could get hacked
• You could leave clients and colleagues hanging

Let’s dive into the concerns surrounding your law firm’s digital assets, and how best to handle them to avoid those outcomes. 

Domain Names: Lock the Door to Your Digital House

Your law firm’s domain name (the name typically followed by .com) is the core of your firm’s online identity. It’s the address for your website, and the part of your email address that follows the @ symbol. Domain names are renewed on an annual basis; the renewal fee is usually around $20 to $50. 

It’s common, but incredibly dangerous, for law firms to just let their domain name expire when the practice closes. That may save the price of a lunch or two, but could ultimately cost you much more. A freshly expired domain name goes back on the market where it’s likely to be snapped up by bad actors, exposing the attorney to fraud and identity theft. Here’s how.

Expired domains can be effortlessly re-registered, allowing the new owner to reactivate email service on the old domain to read any messages still being sent to the firm’s old email addresses. Even worse, they may send email from the old addresses to impersonate the attorney.

With access to email, the new owner can reset passwords, allowing access to any online service where the old email address is still the primary login. Now file-sharing services, servers, legal portals, banking, court services, social media, and more have been compromised. In a nutshell, your professional online presence and that of your law firm can be spoofed and stolen. 

That’s a hefty risk to take for saving $50 or less per year. Instead, take these three steps to protect your identity, information, and peace of mind: 

1. Don’t let old domain names expire, especially those that were used for email. Register them for 10 years or more so they can’t be swiped by bad actors.
2. Verify annually that the contact information and payment information on the account is current.
3. If the domain will no longer be used in any capacity, set it to “parked” or “dormant” status, which will effectively put it on ice.

One retired attorney we know recently checked her old law firm’s domain more than ten years after closing her practice; it’s now in the clutches of a Southeast Asian online gambling outfit, but no other damage appears to have been done. 

She’s one of the lucky ones. An Australian cybersecurity expert reported on what information they were able to easily hack from law firms by re-registering expired domains. (That article dates from 2018, showing that this is not a new phenomenon. If anything, hackers have gotten more sophisticated.) If we haven’t already convinced you not to let your domain registration expire, reading that report might be persuasive.

Your Website: A Tool for Communication (and a Potential Source of Profit)

The best practice for a law firm closing due to a retirement is to replace their existing website with a brief, professional announcement. The announcement should make clear that the firm is closed, and provide contact information for the attorney, such as: 

We recommend posting this notice for six months to a year, after which it can be taken offline. While having the announcement up will require continued hosting of the firm’s website account, the expense should be minimal since the announcement is only a single page.

Remember that while you may be closing down your firm’s website, the site may have components worth selling. For instance, if you have a substantial body of content through informative blog posts or in-depth practice area pages, competing firms may be interested in purchasing this content and transferring the pages’ search engine rankings. These assets can be worth thousands of dollars. 

Even if you decide to shut down your website entirely, consider saving a copy or printing off a PDF. That law practice represented a major part of your life. You may decide you want a memento with which to look back on it. 

Email Accounts: Carefully Wind Down

Your email serves not just as a means of communication with clients, attorneys, vendors, courts, and colleagues, but as the primary username for online access to many services. As noted above, someone who gains access to your email can also get into these other accounts. 

Most attorneys have a professional email address with their own domain name, and when they close their practices, they should close down this email address as well. Here are the steps to take to wind down your firm’s email: 

1. Establish a personal account if you don’t have one. Most people already have a personal Gmail or other email account, but if you don’t, you can establish one in minutes to replace the work email address.
2. Change logins. Any accounts (including social media, online shopping, banking, etc.) that will remain active after you retire should be switched over to your personal email account before you close down your work email.
3. Notify contacts. You should send a retirement notice to clients and contacts, and it should include your new email address. 

You should also have any email that was sent to the old account automatically forwarded to the new personal account for a period of time. That will require keeping the old accounts running, but offers the convenience of not having to chase down messages sent to the wrong address.

Another useful tool is the out-of-office autoresponder you’ve probably used in the past when on vacation. It can also be used to let people who send email to your old address that you’ve retired and how to reach you.

If you need assistance with email forwarding, setup, and related issues, feel free to reach out; we’re happy to connect you with someone who can help.  

Local Business Listings: Close Up Shop

Dozens of third-party websites publish business contact information and reviews. These include a law firm’s Google Business Profile, Angi, and Yelp, among many others. When people search for your firm by name, these listings feature prominently in search results. 

You could, as many attorneys do, just let them languish. Over time, these third-party sites will eventually “learn” from public databases and feedback that your law firm is closed. To avoid confusing your public, though, it is better to log into each listing and manually indicate that your firm is no longer open. 

Admittedly, this can be a bit time-consuming; using our free business location audit tool can speed up the process and get direct links to your public listings. 

Perform Business Location Audit

Professional and Social Profiles

    

It’s likely you’ve accumulated a variety of professional and social media profiles over the course of your career, including: 

• LinkedIn
• Avvo
• Martindale
• SuperLawyers
• X (formerly Twitter) 
• Facebook
• Bluesky
• Instagram
• YouTube
• TikTok
• Local and state bar profiles

Often, it makes sense to simply delete and remove these profiles. Some, like LinkedIn or many state bars, allow you to leave a profile up, but designate yourself as retired; that way, colleagues won’t wonder where you disappeared to. 

Our advice to clients is to shut down any accounts that are not active or were simply for self-promotion. Cancel any such as SuperLawyers or Martindale that carry an annual expense. If you have any law firm social media accounts with a lot of engagement, you might consider maintaining them after your retirement. You may enjoy using them to educate the public, and might get some referral income out of them at the same time. 

Set Google Alerts for Your Name and the Firm Name

After you retire, the hope is that you’ll be doing online searches for information relating to your new hobbies and next vacation destination; chances are you won’t be obsessively Googling the name of your law firm. 

Setting Google Alerts is a low-effort, zero-cost measure with significant benefits. Google Alerts is a free monitoring service that notifies you if there’s new online content that matches a keyword or phrase you have identified. It allows you to do reputation management, keeping you informed of what’s being said about your firm online, even after your retirement. Having that information sent to your inbox allows you to promptly address any misinformation and, more importantly, protect against misuse of your firm’s name. 

Consider setting alerts for terms like: 

• “Mary Q. Smith”
• “Attorney Mary Q. Smith”
• “Mary Q. Smith Law Firm”
• “Smith Law Firm LLC”

You can dictate the frequency with which you receive notifications; pause alerts, edit them, or delete them altogether; and limit the regions and languages searched. Setting alerts takes only minutes, but can provide peace of mind indefinitely.

Consider A Law Firm Broker as You Plan Your Next Chapter

You may be eagerly anticipating retirement from law practice, a little apprehensive about the changes retirement will bring, or both. You’ve likely planned for your retirement for years in the financial sense. You may have given less thought to the mechanics of winding down your practice, and the emotional realities of what it means to be an attorney who is no longer practicing law. 

Working with a law firm broker or coach who focuses on helping attorneys sell and exit from practice can help you retire with intention. A broker can help make sure the transition is a smooth one, both administratively and personally; help you ensure your staff and clients are taken care of; and help you extract some financial value out of your business instead of just locking the door and walking away.

With regards to the firm's website, don't overlook that there may be sellable components. For instance, if you have built a substantial body of content with your blog, or about certain practice areas, competing law firms may be interested in purchasing this content. It is completely possible to sell, and transfer search engine rankings, from parts or all of a website and this can easily be worth thousands of dollars.

Need Help Wrapping Up the Digital Side of Your Practice?

When you’re looking to close down your practice, you have a lot on your plate. If you need help retiring your online presence, The Modern Firm is here to help. More and more of our long-term clients are retiring, and we have developed a retirement service that will tidily wind down your practice’s online presence using best practices. Just drop us a line at support@themodernfirm.com.

Enjoy Your Retirement!

Well, you’ve made it! You’ve navigated years of practice, lots of legal developments, and technological change, and it’s time to reap the rewards of your hard work. We hope this post has given you some insights and peace of mind about how to wrap up this chapter of your life, so you can thoroughly enjoy the next one.