At a meeting at Milbank yesterday, a senior partner had occasion to recount the tale of the pencil-sharpener, which was an actual employee at the firm decades ago.
The pencil-sharpener’s role was to circulate throughout the office collecting used pencils and replacing them with sharp ones. So far, so good, and so far, so invisible.
But one day the senior partner had reason to visit a paralegal’s cubicle and noticed that all the pencils, while sharp, were very short; and all of his pencils were very long.
You can intuit the rest. The pencil-sharpener provided partners with long pencils, associates with medium-length ones, and paralegals with short ones. Legend has it that a partner presented with a short pencil threw it back at the pencil-sharpener, and a lesson was learned.
A quaint tale of a bygone time where associates and paralegals were duly put in their place, silently and (almost) invisibly, but with utter certitude and devastating effects were they to be reflected upon for a moment.
Isn’t it great we all know better now?
