LawMail.org looks too much like Google for comfort

This is a software blog, not a clearinghouse for legal advice, but I have to say that I'd probably change my site design around a bit if I owned lawmail.org. Law Mail is a certified email service -- for lawyers! -- that provides secure, private, tracked messaging for the transmission of legal documents. Good idea. The legal profession is largely still mired in the dark ages of faxes and snail-mail because of the need to verify important documents.

Here's the bad idea: the Law Mail site might look a bit familiar to you at first glance. Specifically, it might look a heck of a lot like Google. From the primary-colored serif logo to the barely modified Gmail favicon, everything about this site added up to confuse me about whether it was actually a new service from Google. And that's not even mentioning that the phrase "powered by Google" shows up all over the Law Mail site. Sure, tech-savvy people know that "powered by" doesn't mean "owned by," but it throws you off for a second.

Law Mail is a pretty good idea for a service, but it's an idea that needs credibility to function. Whether or not you think they're trying to borrow some credibiity from Google, the fact that you have to think about it means they're dead in the water. It's not too late to rebrand and hire a savvy designer, and I hope that's what Law Mail will do. It would certainly keep them from getting a few Law Mails of their own from Google's attorneys.

Tags: google, law, law-mail, lawmail, lawyers, ripoff