To give you an example, there will be 4 law-related extensions initially: Dot Attorney, Dot Law, Dot Lawyer and Dot Legal. Since we also have singular/plural-related issues such as Dot Accountant vs. Dot Accountants, I’m reasonably confident that in the future, we’ll also have a Dot Attorneys new gTLD as well as a Dot Lawyers one.

As a domainer, this leaves you scratching your head.

I’ve stated on more than one occasion that it might have been a better idea to only allow one new gTLD in such cases but the current situation is what it is, c’est la vie.

So, what should domainers do?

Let’s assume you get Chicago.Attorney, should you also go after all of the other “Chicago + law-related new gTLD” combinations? In other words, should you also buy Chicago.Law, Chicago.Lawyer and Chicago.Legal? And if Dot Attorneys and Dot Lawyers were to be included in the next batch of launches, should you get those as well?

I can crunch some numbers for you if you’d like me to but I don’t think it’s necessary, as it should be blatantly obvious that the carrying costs of such a portfolio would be huge. New gTLDs are a few times more expensive than dot com/net/org domains as it is, let’s not even talk about what would happen if you were to go after your desired term in all similar extensions.

Maybe for amazingly strong terms, it might be an option but all in all, I wouldn’t exactly be thrilled about such a business model if I were you.

In my opinion, domainers are better off limiting themselves to one version, to the one they consider superior. There are no “one size fits all” answers, so it depends on the term. For an individual lawyer for example, a Dot Attorney or Dot Lawyer domain would be more appropriate than a Dot Attorneys or Dot Lawyers domain. For a law firm, the exact opposite is true.

The fact that similar extensions exist is not a good thing for domainers but that’s just the way things stand. I for one would recommend limiting yourself to the best possible choice for the term you have in mind and leaving it at that. At least that way, you might not lose what little sanity you have left once renewals start knocking on the door.