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Who

Skadden Arps' only living name partner, corporate attorney Joe Flom is a legal legend.

Backstory

When Flom applied to law school, he didn't even have a college degree. That didn't seem to be an issue for Harvard Law: Flom was accepted anyway and after graduating in 1948, he joined Skadden as its first associate three months after the firm was founded. (His starting salary: $3,600 a year.) Flom quickly established himself as the firm's chief rainmaker and earned a promotion to partner in short order. By the 1960s, Flom had become the premiere mergers and acquisitions attorney in town, a position he held for the next two decades as he represented the likes of TWA, RJR Nabisco, Conoco, U.S. Steel, General Electric, and Revlon. (Just how big was Flom? In 1978, he played a part in 21 of the 22 major takeovers that took place.) He also earned a rep as a ruthless, hardnosed negotiator, deploying the sort of tactics that had never been applied to the staid world of corporate law. (When Occidental Petroleum threatened a Skadden client with a takeover in the '70s, for example, Flom launched an embarrassing personal investigation into Occidental's chairman, Armand Hammer, who quickly dropped the bid.) Flom later settled into a more senior statesman role at Skadden, championing expansion plans—Skadden now has more than 2,000 attorneys in nine U.S. cities and 12 foreign capitals—and pushing the firm to diversify beyond M&A into real estate, bankruptcy and securities work.

Of note

Now in his eighties, Flom no longer works a full schedule, but he continues to come into the office to consult with the firm's most valued clients. He spends a good deal of his time on various educational and philanthropic projects. Over the years, he's served on the boards of Barnard College, NYU Medical Center, and United Way of New York City. He also founded the Joseph H. Flom Global Health and Human Rights Initiative, a partnership with the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law. His legal legacy and non-profit work has earned him countless commendations. In 2004, he was honored with lifetime achievement awards from Chambers and Partners and American Lawyer.

On the job

Skadden boasts heavy-hitters across a number of practice areas. A few of the partners whom Flom works with: Sheila Birnbaum, the firm's product liability guru; Washington powerhouse Robert Bennett; Greg Milmoe, who is co-head of corporate restructuring; litigation expert Preeta Bansal; Nancy Lieberman, an M&A star; Ken Plevan, who heads up the firm's intellectual property practice; and Skadden old-timers like Ken Bialkin and Helene Kaplan.

In print

You can read all about Flom's rise in the 1994 book Skadden: Power, Money, and the Rise of a Legal Empire by Lincoln Caplan.

Personal

Flom lives in Scarborough-on-Hudson, in a home he purchased for $3.9 million in early 2006; his wife of many years, Claire, passed away in November 2007. Their son, Jason Flom, is the CEO of the Capitol Music Group.