Joseph Flom
Joseph Harold Flom (December 31, 1923 in Baltimore, Maryland is the last living named partner of the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. He has a corner office high atop the Conde Nast tower in Manhattan.
Early life and education
Flom grew up in the Depression in Brooklyn’s borough Park neighborhood. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father Isadore was a union organizer in the garment industry who later went to work swing shoulders pads for ladies dresses and his mother worked doing appliqué at home. Flom’s family was very poor and moved almost every year when he was growing up. He attended the elite Townsend Harris public school which produced three Nobel Prize winners.
Joe Flom wanted to become a lawyer since he was six years old. He got into Harvard without a college degree by simply writing them a letter explaining he was the answer to slice bread and was named to the Law Review – an honor reserved for the very top students in the class.
Career
During the hiring season Joseph Flom along with one more kid was the only two without a job. Then one day he heard about some guys who were starting their own firm and Joe decided to join them. In the beginning it was just Marshall Skadden, Leslie Arps both of whom had just been turned down for partner at a major Wall Street law firms and John Slate, who had worked for Pan Am airlines. Flom was their associate and they did whatever kind of law came through their doors.
Joe Flom took over as Skadden’s managing partner in 1954 and firm begin to grow by leaps and bounds and in no time grew to 100 lawyers, then 200 and then 300 lawyers. Today Skadden Arps has around two thousand attorneys in twenty-three offices around the world and earn well over $1 billion a year making it one of the largest and most powerful law firms in the world. Joe hangs with the presidents and lives in a Luxurious building on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
Joe flom made it big and the old line Wall Street Law firms were the main reason for his success. They were the corporate law firm representing the largest clients in the country but did not do litigation and did not involve themselves in hostile corporate takeover. Proxy war is the main weapon for hostile takeover; an investor would take an interest in a company, he would denounce the management as incompetent and send letters to shareholders, trying to get them to give him their “proxy” so he could vote out the firm’s executives. And to run the proxy fight, the only lawyer the investor could get was someone like Joe Flom. There were lawyers who knew more about the rules of proxy contests, but no one was better in a fight than Joe Flom.
Joe Flom’s will to win in hostile takeover was unsurpassed and he was often masterful. Then came the 1970’s; the old aversion to lawsuits fell by the wayside. It became easier to borrow money. Federal regulations were relaxed. Markets became internationalized. Investors became more aggressive, and the result was a boom in the number and size of corporate takeovers. Joe Flom was the best at hostile takeover and he used it to grow his law firm to one of the biggest law firm in the world.
Joseph H. Flom was behind the emergence of Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom as one of the most powerful law firms in the world<ref>[http://www.ferguslex.com/ferg.401.review.flom.html The Law According To Joseph Flom}Cite error: The opening <ref> tag is malformed or has a bad name (see the help page).. The other large law firms made it very easy for Joe to work on something that they did not touch. Not only they left Joe alone but they also passed him all the business they could. When in 1970 hostile take over became big there was no match in the market for Joe Flom and his will to win. Joe made it big because he was good at proxy wars but at the same time he was left without serious competition.