Sandwiched between those years was 20th-century America’s longest run of mergers, acquisitions and divestitures, lasting from 1974 to 1989. Mature companies were seeking to rekindle their growth through new business combinations, and takeover artists were lunging after chances to reap big short-term gains.
Under Mr. Mullen, who died on Saturday at 83 in New Preston, Conn., Skadden Arps spotted the potential of mergers and acquisitions early on and then captured that business when New York’s more genteel corporate law firms were mostly shunning it.
The white-shoe firms “said that takeovers were a one-time blip,” recalled John C. Coffee Jr., a law professor at Columbia, who in the mid-1970s practiced at one of those firms, Cravath, Swaine Moore. “They said that Skadden was riding a short-term wave, and that it would be caught in a terrible crunch when it crashed and disappeared.”
They misjudged. Advising on corporate takeovers proved to be a lasting and highly profitable business, attracting big corporate clients instead of scaring them off. Mr. Mullen and his colleagues plowed the earnings into Skadden Arps’s expansion and diversification into other areas of the law.
By the time merger mania died down in 1989, after the collapse of the junk-bond financier Drexel Burnham Lambert, Skadden Arps was no longer a small, specialized firm but a fixture in the top tier of the corporate bar, claiming about a third of the Fortune 500 as clients. It remains the world’s second-largest law firm by revenue, according to The American Lawyer, and the 11th-largest by number of lawyers.
“We like to think of our client as Wall Street,” Mr. Mullen once told an interviewer.
His death, while en route to a hospital, was caused by a heart attack, his son-in-law, Thomas White, said.
Mr. Mullen joined the firm as a lawyer but ended up devoting most of his time to its business operations. Joseph H. Flom, the firm’s high-octane chairman at the time, reveled in takeover battles; Mr. Mullen excelled at building consensus among the firm’s powerful partners, making strategic decisions about growth and compensation and promoting the kind of community engagement that others at the young firm tended to overlook.
In the 1970s, Mr. Mullen started the practice of withholding 7.5 percent from each partner’s earnings — after taxes — and using the money to finance the firm’s growth. For all the leverage and exotic financial instruments that Skadden Arps helped its clients employ, Mr. Mullen saw to it that the firm itself grew without taking on debt.
“It was radical,” Lincoln Caplan wrote in his history of the firm, “Skadden: Power, Money, and the Rise of a Legal Empire” (1993). “It left Skadden with a mountain of cash — 100 percent more capital than it needed, by the firm’s estimation, and the means to grow in any direction it wanted.”
Skadden Arps partners sometimes cribbed from the Gospel in explaining Mr. Flom’s and Mr. Mullen’s contrasting roles at the top of the firm, Mr. Caplan wrote, quoting one executive as saying, “Joe was Jesus, and Peter was the rock on which he built his church.”
The two men shared a trait that was common among many who joined the firm in its upstart years. They were outsiders who had been rejected by the established law firms that had a hammerlock on the blue-chip corporate and investment banking work that Skadden Arps sought in the 1960s.
Mr. Flom, the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia, did well at Harvard Law School but attracted no job offers until the tiny new firm of Skadden, Arps Slate came looking for its first associate.
Mr. Mullen came from a Roman Catholic family and was educated by the Jesuits, first at the Loyola School on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, then at Georgetown, in the days when Catholics were still unwelcome in the largely Protestant white-shoe firms. After Columbia Law School, he spent nine years at the firm of Dewey Ballantine, only to be voted down for a partnership.
“He was mature, confident and ambitious, and a very good corporate lawyer,” Mr. Caplan, who is on the editorial board of The New York Times, recalled in an e-mail. “But he had that essential Skadden need and drive because, in the eyes of the New York City bar then, not making partner was a public failure from which he needed to recover. When he went to Skadden in 1961, at the age of 32 (he turned 33 that year), he was motivated to succeed.”
Peter Paul Mullen was born in Manhattan in April 8, 1928, the son of John and Elsie Mullen. His father was a New York State Criminal Court judge, and his mother was a librarian. Skadden Arps made him partner after his first year with the firm, and managing partner in 1967, putting him in charge of its business operations.
He served on Georgetown’s board from 1982 to 1998 and was its chairman from 1985 to 1992. He was also once chairman of Orbis International, which provides eye care in developing countries.
Mr. Mullen is survived by his wife, Cecilia, known as Billie; five children, Peter, Kirby White, Elaine Peer, Lucy Ball and Jeff; and nine grandchildren. Mr. Flom died in February at 87.
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