Who owns your law firm's website when you fire your web designer?

Four separate assets, four separate answers, and most firms have never checked any of them. Here is how to find out in about fifteen minutes.

If you rent office space and pay to have proper millwork built into the reception area, you paid for it, you chose it, and it is yours in every sense except the one that matters. The day the lease ends, it stays. Nobody hid that from you. It is simply what improving somebody else's property means.

Want this handled instead of DIY'd? See pricing and get a fixed-price quote.

A great many law firm websites are leasehold improvements, and unlike the millwork, nobody explained it at signing.

The reason this hits family law practices harder than most is the size of the vertical's vendor market. Legal directories bundle a "free website" with the listing. Template vendors sell a monthly package with the site, hosting, and support folded together. Both are perfectly legitimate products. Neither is a purchase, and the difference only becomes visible on the day you want to leave.

It is not one asset, it is four

The mistake is thinking of "the website" as a single thing you either own or do not. It is four separate things, held in four separate places, and a firm can own three of them and still be stuck.

The most important one, and the cheapest to get right. Your domain is the only asset here that cannot be rebuilt, because it is the address on every business card, every letterhead, every referral, and every email address at the firm.

How to check, right now: go to `lookup.icann.org` and enter your domain. Look at the Registrant Organization and Registrant Email fields. If they name your firm and a firm email address, good. If they name your web designer, their company, or a personal address at their agency, you have a problem, and it is the one worth solving first.

Then check the thing the lookup will not tell you: can you personally log in to the registrar account and see the domain, today, without asking anyone. Ownership on paper with no access is a slower version of the same problem.

Where the site physically lives, and whether you can get a copy of it.

How to check: can you log in to the hosting control panel yourself. Is the account billed to the firm's card, or is hosting a line item on a vendor invoice. Can you download a full backup, meaning the files and the database, without a request.

If hosting is bundled into a monthly fee and you have no login, you do not have hosting. You have a lease on someone else's server.

The one that catches people, because it looks fine until the moment of departure.

There are two categories. Standard software, which any competent developer anywhere can take over, and proprietary builders, where the pages exist only inside that vendor's system and there is no meaningful way to take them out. Proprietary systems sometimes offer an export, and the export is often a folder of flat HTML that resembles your site the way a photograph of a car resembles a car.

How to check: ask the vendor one question in writing. "If we leave, what exactly do we receive, in what format, and can another developer run the site from it?" A vendor whose answer is a clear yes will say so in one line. An answer that arrives long, warm, and vague is an answer.

The forgotten fourth, and losing it hurts more than losing the site.

Email. If your firm's email runs through an account the vendor controls, a dispute can interrupt client communication, which is a different order of problem from a dark website. Check who controls your domain's mail settings and whose account your mailboxes actually live in.

Photographs. Custom photography of your attorneys and your office is usually licensed rather than sold, and the license is frequently held by the vendor or the photographer, not by you. Ask for the license terms in writing before you assume the headshots travel with you. Stock images almost never travel.

Measurement and advertising accounts. Any analytics or advertising account should be owned by the firm with the vendor added as a user, rather than the reverse. Years of history live there and it cannot be reconstructed after the fact.

The five questions to ask any vendor before you sign

Ask these of me too. A vendor who answers all five plainly is probably fine, whatever they charge.

1. In whose name is the domain registered, and can I log in to the registrar myself? 2. Is the hosting account in my firm's name, and can I download a full backup whenever I want? 3. Is the site built on standard software another developer could take over, or on your own system? 4. If I leave, what do I receive, in what format, and how long does it take? 5. Who holds the license to the photographs, and who owns the analytics account?

Write the answers down. Not because anybody is lying, but because "we'll sort that out" in a friendly first meeting has a habit of becoming a different conversation three years later with different people in the room.

If you are already locked in

First, the honest caveat. Whether your agreement gives you a right to any of this is a contract question and belongs to your own counsel, not to a web designer. What follows is only the technical picture.

Chase the domain first. It is the one asset that cannot be recreated and the one most likely to be recoverable, because registrant records are administrative rather than creative. If the registrant details are wrong, correcting them is often a straightforward process with the registrar. Everything else can be rebuilt. The address cannot.

Assume the pages are rebuildable. If the platform will not release anything usable, the practical answer is usually to rebuild rather than to fight. Your text can be copied from your own live site. Your photographs may need re-licensing or re-shooting. A rebuild is a known cost with an end date, which is more than can be said for a dispute.

Deal with email before anything else moves. Sort out where mail lives and who controls it before any domain or hosting change is attempted. An interrupted website is embarrassing. Interrupted client email is not.

Do it while the relationship is calm. The best time to establish that your domain is registered to your firm is a quiet Tuesday when nobody is unhappy with anybody. Ask now.

Why I go on about this

Because it is the whole difference between what I sell and what most of this market sells, and because it costs a vendor nothing to do it correctly.

On every build here the domain is registered in the firm's name, the hosting account is in the firm's name, and the site runs on standard software any competent developer could take over tomorrow. If you decide in three years that somebody else should look after it, there is nothing to negotiate back, no export fee, and no phone call where I explain that it is more complicated than you thought.

That is not generosity. It is what buying something is supposed to mean.

Solos carry the most exposure here, because the monthly-package vendors aim squarely at them: websites for solo family law attorneys.

Email hello@divorcewebdesigner.com, or use the contact form.