Law school email addresses can be vital tools for law students to connect with people in an academic community and have a connection to the institution they attended. Indeed, I used my law school email address throughout law school and for perhaps a year or two after I graduated, mainly because many of my contacts at the time were people with whom I attended law school, and communicating with them through my law school email account was easier. One time, I even used my law school email address to score a free Xbox when Microsoft ran a promotion for people who had “.edu” email addresses! However, using your law school email address years after graduating usually looks weird, and people should use other email addresses after they start their legal careers.
I know someone who still uses their law school email account years after they graduate from law school as their all-purpose email address. That person attended a prestigious law school, and it seems as though using that email address is a way to announce that they attended said prestigious law school. However, it is clear that this is the reason why this person uses a law school email address, and it comes off as very pretentious. The curious can look at the person’s resume or LinkedIn information to know they attended a prestigious law school; the individual doesn’t need to use their law school email address to convey that point.
I thought that person was an outlier, but more recently, I encountered another individual who also uses their law school email address years after graduating from law school. Hilariously, both of these people went to the same law school! Like Andy Bernard from “The Office” looking for any reason to convey that he went to an Ivy League school, graduates from this particular law school seem fixated on the fact that they attended it years earlier. Unless there is some benefit I am unaware of to using that law school email account instead of a normal one, people should get with the program and ditch law school email addresses shortly after graduating.
Perhaps some people might think that switching to a regular email account will make it more difficult to communicate with people with whom they went to school. However, individuals who are part of the same alumni community have a plethora of ways to communicate. LinkedIn offers a great way to message contacts with whom an individual might have attended school, and people can just use easily accessible work email addresses to stay in touch. In most instances, law school graduates have no reason to cling to their law school email accounts, and I have suffered no consequences from abandoning mine nearly a decade ago.
Of course, there are some good reasons for why law school graduates should maintain their law school email accounts. If an individual is still a professor, mentor, or part of a law school community in some other capacity, it makes sense to maintain a law school email account. Moreover, people can maintain access to their law school email accounts without using it for communications. It is true that people might have useful materials in their law school email account that they do not want to give up, and I also had paper drafts, communications, and other materials in my law school email account that are worth having access to.
However, people who use their law school email accounts years after graduating should take a step back and evaluate if it actually makes sense to be doing so. If people are only using law school email accounts to broadcast that they went to a prestigious school, they should rethink their actions, since this comes off as pretentious and makes people look like they have a strange fixation on the past.
Jordan Rothman is a partner of The Rothman Law Firm, a full-service New York and New Jersey law firm. He is also the founder of Student Debt Diaries, a website discussing how he paid off his student loans. You can reach Jordan through email at jordan@rothman.law.
