Business Email
Named mailboxes, shared intake addresses and why firm mail should not sit on a free account.
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Web Hosting for Law Firms
For most firms the website is the least interesting part of the account. The exposure sits behind it, in the mailboxes. Who can read intake, what happens to an associate's mail after they leave, and where privileged material ends up: web hosting for law firms is mostly those questions, whether anyone treats them that way or not.
With web hosting for law firms, the email is the purchase
A firm website is a handful of pages that change a few times a year. Practice areas, attorney bios, a contact form, maybe some articles. As a thing to put on a server it is unremarkable, and the hosting side of it is close to solved the day you set it up.
The mailboxes are different. They carry intake, they carry correspondence, and in a lot of firms they carry documents that should never have been sent by email in the first place. That is where the real decisions live, and it is why we push firms to think about business email first and the web plan second.
Structure it once, deliberately. A named mailbox for every attorney and every staff member. Shared addresses for the functions rather than the people, so intake@ and billing@ exist independently of whoever happens to be handling them this year. Forwarding used sparingly and written down when it is used.
The pattern that causes the most trouble is a personal free address quietly doing firm work. It is outside your control, it does not stop when the person does, and it makes any later question about who saw what unanswerable.
If your firm runs on Outlook and calendars people actually share, the mail is likely to belong on Microsoft 365 rather than a mailbox bundled with the web plan. Both are ordinary options. The important thing is that one of them is a decision instead of a leftover.
Your firm's mail, structured once
Send us how the firm's mailboxes are set up now, including anything still running through a personal free address. We will lay out named mailboxes and shared intake addresses, or tell you yours are already fine.
Shared intake mailboxes and who is allowed in them
Almost every firm has an address that more than one person reads. It is the right answer, because a new matter arriving at a single attorney's mailbox on the week they are on trial is how enquiries get lost. But shared access has to be an actual list, not a habit.
The failure looks like this. Intake goes to a shared address. Four people can read it. One of them left in March. Nobody can say for certain whether their access was ever removed, because it was set up by whoever set up the mail and never written down.
What to settle before the first enquiry arrives
- Who is on the intake mailbox by name, kept somewhere you can look at in a minute.
- Whether access is shared credentials or individual permissions. Shared credentials cannot be revoked for one person, which is the whole problem.
- Whether the website contact form emails the shared address, a personal one, or both. Check the form's actual settings rather than assuming.
- Where form submissions are stored besides email. Many forms keep a copy, and that copy is a record you now hold.
- What the form page tells a prospective client. Most firms want language making clear that sending it does not create a relationship. Your own adviser should write that wording, not us.
None of this is exotic. It takes an afternoon once and it is the difference between answering a question about access with a list and answering it with a guess.
An associate leaves, and it becomes a confidentiality event
Offboarding at a firm is not the same job as offboarding at a landscaping company. The departing mailbox holds client correspondence, and the firm has an obligation to keep that material available and controlled. Deleting the account on the last day is the wrong instinct. So is leaving it live with the old password on somebody's phone.
Handle it as a sequence. Do it in this order and you never have a window where mail is either unreachable or readable by the wrong person.
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Change the password before the last day ends
Not after. The point is to end personal access at a moment you choose. If the mailbox is on a phone or a home machine, changing the password is what actually removes it.
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Keep the mailbox, do not delete it
Convert it to something only a partner or the administrator can open. Client correspondence in there may need to be produced later, and it belongs to the firm.
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Redirect the address rather than bouncing it
Clients and opposing counsel will write to that address for years. Route it to the attorney taking over the matters, or to intake. A bounce is a missed deadline waiting to happen.
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Remove them from every shared mailbox
This is the step that gets skipped, because shared access is invisible from the departing account. Work from your list. If there is no list, this is the moment you find out.
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Take their name off the website the same week
A bio for someone who left in March, still live in September, is a small thing that reads badly to a prospective client and occasionally to a regulator. Pull the bio, and check the practice area pages that name them.
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Write down what you did
One line per departure in a file the administrator keeps. In two years the only question anyone will ask is whether access was removed, and this is the only thing that answers it.
Bar and professional conduct expectations around client files and confidentiality vary by state and change over time. Treat the sequence above as the technical hygiene, and check the obligations themselves with your own ethics counsel.
Practice groups and bios at firm scale
A firm of any size has two kinds of page that grow on their own. Practice area pages, and attorney bios. Both are worth a moment of planning because both become maintenance.
On practice areas, the mistake is one thin page per keyword. Twelve near-identical pages about family law in slightly different words compete with each other and convince nobody. Fewer, longer pages that actually explain how the firm handles a matter do better with search engines and considerably better with the person reading them.
On bios, the mistake is structural. If a bio can only be edited by whoever built the site, it will be wrong. Admissions change, an attorney makes partner, somebody leaves. Bios need to be editable in-house by a person at the firm, in minutes, without a support ticket.
- Give every attorney a real page rather than a name in a list. People search for attorneys by name, and that page should be yours rather than a directory's.
- Keep bar admissions and practice areas current. It is the detail a prospective client checks and the detail most often stale.
- Be careful with anything that reads as a promise about outcomes. Advertising rules for attorneys are strict in some states and your own adviser should review the wording.
- If the firm publishes articles, keep them on your own domain. Legal directories are fine as a listing and poor as a home.
This is also the point where a firm site starts to justify a content management system, usually WordPress. That brings its own upkeep, and what a WordPress plan does and does not arrange for you is covered on the WordPress hosting page.
The departure checklist you do not have yet
We can write down who is on every shared mailbox, put the offboarding sequence in order for your administrator, and handle the password, redirect and bio removal the week an attorney leaves.
Who should not buy this, and what to read instead
If you practise alone, most of this page is aimed past you.
A solo practitioner has one mailbox. There is no shared intake address, no offboarding, no question about who else can read the mail, because the answer is you. The concerns are genuinely different: keeping firm mail separate from personal mail, making sure the address survives a change of website, and not losing the domain. Start with hosting for attorneys, which is written for a single practitioner or a small practice. This page is about what changes when several people share the same mail.
- You do not need a large plan for a site that is bios, practice areas and a contact form.
- You do not need a separate mailbox for every variation of your name. One good address beats five you never check.
- You do not need a managed service to run a five page site that changes twice a year.
- You almost certainly do need every attorney and staff member on a named mailbox at the firm domain, and that is worth paying for.
Where spending more is honest: you have staff turnover and need individual permissions rather than shared logins, you are running a site large enough to need a proper content system, or you are moving mail off a setup nobody at the firm understands. Headcount alone does not do it. A twelve attorney firm with a static site is still a small hosting problem.
The unglamorous parts that actually bite
Two things take firms offline more often than anything on this page, and neither is dramatic.
The first is a domain expiring. Nobody renews it because the renewal notice goes to a former administrator's address, and the firm loses its website and every mailbox on the same morning. The fix is boring and permanent: renewals on auto, the contact address a shared one that survives departures, and a look at domain expiration once so you know what the warning signs look like.
The second is backups. A firm site is small, and small sites get restored from nothing more than once. Know where your backups are, how far back they go, and who can restore one. Then make sure the answer does not depend on a single person's memory.
Also worth doing once: put a certificate on the site so the contact form is not submitting over an open connection, which the SSL page explains, and confirm the form actually delivers. Test it from an outside address twice a year. A quiet form is indistinguishable from a quiet month.
How AldoMedia helps
AldoMedia has built and looked after websites for Western New York businesses since 1999. We are an independent authorised reseller rather than the operator of the underlying platform, and firm work usually starts with the mail rather than the site.
If your mail is somewhere nobody at the firm chose, the order of operations that moves it without losing anything in flight is on the email migration page. Call 716-771-2536 or tell us how your firm's mail is set up now, and we will tell you what needs changing and what does not.
Common questions
Law firm hosting questions
Should intake go to a shared mailbox or to an individual attorney?
A shared address, in almost every case. An enquiry that lands in one attorney's mailbox during a trial week is how new matters get lost. What matters is that access to the shared address is individual permissions rather than a shared password, and that you can name everyone on it. Shared credentials cannot be revoked for one person, which is exactly what you need to do when somebody leaves.
What do we do with an associate's mailbox after they leave?
Keep it, do not delete it. Change the password before the last day ends so personal access stops at a moment you choose, convert the mailbox to something only a partner or administrator can open, and redirect the address to whoever is taking over the matters. Then remove them from every shared mailbox, which is the step that gets forgotten. Your own ethics counsel should confirm what your state expects around retaining client correspondence.
Can we put client documents in the website's file storage?
No, and it comes up more than you would think. Hosting file space is web space, reachable by anything that guesses the address, and it is not built to be a document system. Client material belongs in whatever document or practice management system the firm uses, with access controls and a record of who opened what. If a client needs to send you something, a secure portal is the tool, not an upload folder on the site.
How many mailboxes does a firm actually need?
One named mailbox per attorney and per staff member, plus a small number of function addresses such as intake@ and billing@ that belong to the role rather than the person. Resist creating extra addresses for name variations, because an address nobody checks is worse than no address. The function addresses are the ones that save you later, since they keep working when the person handling them changes.
We are a two attorney firm. Is this overkill?
The mailbox structure is not, because the reason for it is turnover and shared access rather than size. The rest largely is. A two attorney site is bios, practice areas and a contact form, and an entry shared plan runs that comfortably. If you practise alone, read hosting for attorneys instead, which covers the single mailbox case properly.
Should attorney bios live on our site or on a legal directory?
Both, with your own site as the real one. People search for attorneys by name, and the page they land on should be yours rather than a directory profile you do not control. Directories are useful listings and poor homes. Keep bar admissions and practice areas current on your own pages, and make sure somebody at the firm can edit a bio in minutes without opening a support ticket.
Related
Email Migration
Moving firm mail to a setup you control without losing anything in flight.
How an email move worksMicrosoft 365
When Outlook and shared calendars mean the mail belongs here rather than with the web plan.
Read about Microsoft 365Every trade we cover is listed on hosting by industry.
Hero image: Aklaklakl, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Cropped.
Start with the mailboxes
Tell us how your firm's mail is set up now, including who can read the intake address. We will tell you what needs changing and what is already fine.
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Or call 716-771-2536 and tell us what the site has to do. If the plan you are already on is the right one, we will say so.