Short answer: A Tennessee lawyer website redesign is frequently triggered by a name change — a partner leaves, two firms merge, a solo practice adds a name, or someone decides the trade name should be shorter. That turns a website project into a rebrand, and a rebrand touches the one thing a redesign normally leaves alone: the domain. Tennessee is the right state to work this through, because Rule 7.5 — firm names, offices and of counsel relationships — is the provision that actually bites there. This guide sets out how to rebuild around a name change.
A redesign moves pages. A rebrand moves the address, and everything pointing at it.
What Tennessee adds to a redesign
Tennessee governs lawyer advertising through Rules 7.1 through 7.5 of the Tennessee Rules of Professional Conduct, with the Board of Professional Responsibility handling enforcement. Nashville has been drawing out-of-state firms quickly, which makes firm names, office claims and of counsel relationships the live questions there — we cover them in the Tennessee attorney advertising rules guide.
A rebrand is when all of those get decided at once, quickly, under commercial pressure, by people thinking about a logo. What the firm is called, what the domain implies, whether an office is an office, and how departing and of counsel lawyers are described are all settled in the same fortnight — and then live on the site for years.
This guide does not tell you what Tennessee permits for any particular name or office description. Confirm that with the Board of Professional Responsibility or your ethics counsel, and do it before the domain is bought rather than after the stationery is printed.
The domain is the hard part
Changing domain is the single riskiest thing you can do to a website, and it is routinely bundled into a rebrand as though it were a design decision.
| Task | Why it is easy to miss | Consequence |
|---|---|---|
| Redirect every old URL to its new twin | Page-level mapping is tedious | Traffic lost, not moved |
| Keep the old domain renewed | Feels finished after launch | Redirects die when it lapses |
| Update business profile listings | Sits outside the website project | Old address in local results |
| Update directory and bar profiles | Nobody owns the list | Links point at a dead domain |
| Tell people who link to you | Requires outreach | Inbound links decay to redirects |
| Change email at the same time | Deliverability is a separate system | Intake mail lands in spam |
Two rows deserve emphasis. Keep the old domain registered indefinitely — not for a year, indefinitely. Redirects only work while you control the address they come from, and a lapsed domain takes every old link with it. And treat email as its own project: a new sending domain has no reputation, and intake email quietly landing in spam folders is a failure that looks exactly like a slow month.
What the new name has to be able to support
A Tennessee lawyer website redesign that accompanies a rebrand should settle four content questions before the design starts, because each one shapes a template.
What the name implies. A domain is read as a name before a visitor reaches a word of copy. Descriptive names that suggest an ability to obtain results, or that imply a scale or a presence the firm does not have, are the ones worth checking with counsel. We took the domain-as-trade-name question up in the Alabama guide.
Who is in the firm now. A rebrand usually follows a change in the roster. The bio template needs a field for each lawyer’s own admissions and a way to label of counsel and contract relationships honestly, rather than putting everyone on one grid.
What happens to the departed. Decide in advance what becomes of a former partner’s bio and the content published under their byline. Left to default, the answer is that the page stays up and the posts stay bylined.
What an office is. Firms expanding into Nashville frequently describe a presence before it is fully one. Whatever the arrangement, the site should describe it accurately — and the address in your structured data should match.
Sequence it so you can tell what happened
Avoid doing everything in one week. A domain change, a full redesign and a content restructure launched together means that if traffic moves, nothing tells you which change caused it.
Where the calendar allows, rebuild the site on the existing domain first and let it settle, then move the domain as a separate, clean step with a complete page-level redirect map. Where the rebrand cannot wait, at least keep URLs identical apart from the domain, so the only variable is the hostname.
Then watch Search Console for a month. A spike in 404s or a drop in a specific page group is the earliest reliable sign that the redirect map has a hole, and holes are much cheaper to fix in week two than in month six.
Tennessee lawyer website redesign: frequently asked questions
What happens to my rankings if the firm changes its name and domain?
A page-level redirect map moves most of the value, provided the old domain stays registered indefinitely and every URL maps to its equivalent. Bulk-redirecting everything to the new home page passes very little and is the most common mistake.
How long should I keep the old domain after a rebrand?
Indefinitely. Redirects only work while you control the domain they originate from, and letting it lapse discards every inbound link and bookmark pointing at the old address.
Does Tennessee restrict what a law firm can be called?
Rule 7.5 addresses firm names, and names that mislead as to who practises with the firm or what it can achieve are the concern. Whether a particular name or domain is permissible is a question for the Board of Professional Responsibility or your ethics counsel, ideally before the domain is purchased.
Should a departed partner’s bio stay online?
Decide deliberately rather than by default. Rule 7.5 addresses continued use of the name of a lawyer whose relationship with the firm has ended, and the practical website question is what happens to the page and the content published under that byline.
Should I change domain and redesign at the same time?
Prefer separating them. If the calendar forces both, keep every URL path identical so the hostname is the only variable, which makes any problem diagnosable.
Tennessee lawyer website redesign: the short version
If you take one thing from this guide, take this: put a calendar reminder to renew the old domain, every year, forever, and give it to two people. The redirect map is the most valuable asset a rebrand produces and it stops existing the day that registration lapses — usually three years later, when everyone who set it up has forgotten it exists.
Official source: the Tennessee Board of Professional Responsibility.
Legal Web Agency is a marketing agency, not a law firm, and nothing here is legal advice. Nothing here states whether any particular firm name, domain or office description is permitted in Tennessee. Confirm current requirements with the Board of Professional Responsibility or your ethics counsel.
Related reading: Law Firm Website Redesign: Complete 2026 Guide, plus the Tennessee advertising rules guide and the Alabama guide on domains as trade names.
