Rollonfriday

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

RollOnFriday

URL	http://www.rollonfriday.com/
Type of site	lawyers information
Owner	RollOnFriday Limited
Created by	Matthew Rhodes Piers Warburton
Launched	2000

RollOnFriday (also known as 'RoF') is a website designed for and used by those involved in the legal profession, from law students^[1] to qualified solicitors and barristers including elite Queen's counsel^[2]. Its readership expands beyond this, however, and includes journalists (legal and otherwise) and others from outside the profession.

The site is unusual amongst UK legal websites in that it provides an irreverent insight into the workings of the legal profession in the United Kingdom unlike the high-quality, but more conservative output of other legal sites owned by recruitment consultants or the three principal legal magazines, the Gazette, Legal Week and The Lawyer. As well its own editorial, which takes a satirical tone in weekly stories in the style of Private Eye, RoF includes information on salaries paid by large law firms, and a lightly-censored forum allowing lawyers and the general public to discuss the workings and operations of law firms in an anonymous and frank forum^[3].

1 History and content
2 Discussion board
3 Mentions from outside
4 References
5 External links

[edit] History and content

The site was established in 2000^[4] by Matthew Rhodes and Piers Warburton. The two met while solicitors at the London law firm Ashurst (where Warburton still works as a junior partner). Warburton said at the time that the site was intended to be "young, irreverent and a bit cheeky".^[5]

From launch, the site provided irreverent weekly news stories,^[6] detailed information on individual law firms [1] including the salaries they pay and weekly features such as "glamorous solicitor" [2] showcasing some of the more interestingly-featured of the world's lawyers.

In 2001, the website launched its discussion board and more recently the website has developed a jobs database and other recruitment facilities.^[7] Over the years the site has grown in popularity to the extent it is now part of the legal establishment it once lampooned. Several leading United Kingdom law firms use it as a means of advertising and its own in house recruitment service is acknowledged as being successful.^[8]

RollOnFriday's significance as a talking point for lawyers in Britain is that is has provided an important balance to often biased commentaries and influences from other similar boards run by recruiters.

According to the site's Terms of Use, RollOnFriday is a "Peaches free zone".^[9]

[edit] Discussion board

For many users, the highlight of the site is its discussion board. The "board" allows posters on its forum to choose unique usernames. Such users are known as "Rofers", with the female users often being referred to as "Rofettes".

This board has grown in popularity over the duration of the site. Posts debate legal issues and current news stories of interest; discuss the profession; and swap details of London life. On occasion they assist co-posters with job applications and provide advice on academia, life crises, and restaurants to dine at. Other times it's used as a dating service, as a means for individuals to post emoticons, to tell other posters that they have email and to arrange RoF drinks evenings. The recent addition of a dedicated trainee discussion board has allowed those seeking entry into the English legal profession to seek advice from fellow job seekers and those already practising.

The site's moderators powers include pulling any thread and banning users as they see fit. There is no official mechanism for resurrecting usernames, once banned, but dedicated users who have suffered this punishment can find their way back to the board, using aliases to disguise their identities or just sucking up to Piers and Maffew.^{[citation needed]}

This has led to the phenomenon of regular posters addressing their compadres by their old usernames, which may differ greatly from the ones with which they are now posting; something that can take new users, or "newbies", some time to get to grips with. The addition of the "report offensive thread" button has allowed Rofers a degree of autonomy in policing their own affairs.

Over the years, its posters have developed their own form of slang with words and phrases such as 'lollers', 'alan', 'orla', 'everybody cheered', 'growler', 'heh', 'bloata', and 'nuffink' assuming special unique meaning. Terms such as 'norty', 'filf', 'leetle', 'horn', 'hmong', 'mongtard', 'ghey' and 'wood' (and its rhetorical or sometimes genuinely inquisitive counterpart, 'wood u') are also common parlance. In a related development, mobile phone textspeak has been hijacked and encouraged to grow into something whose comedic qualities have been set ablaze by the careful and knowing economy that marks the usage of a small band of leading posters. Moving somewhat nearer the the boundaries, oblique references to seeing you next Tuesday mushroomed to the point where RoF's administrators were forced to launch their own lexical counter-offensive, resulting in phrases such as 'ladypart' unexpectedly and automatically peppering general discussion. RoF terminology is complemented by the ability to present text in italics, bold or even miniature fonts adding emphasis to such posts.

The board's authorities can grant an icon to users that will appear whenever his or her name appears. This has occasionally led to campaigns by posters begging for an icon.^{[citation needed]}.

[edit] Mentions from outside

On occasion stories have broken on the website, legal and otherwise, which have been taken up in national newspapers. The following is a list of some outside mentions.

National newspapers