Arthur Fleischer Jr., an art-loving lawyer who for decades was one of the leading deal makers in corporate mergers, died on March 21 at his home in Manhattan. He was 92.
The death was confirmed by his wife, Susan.
Over a 65-year career at the firm that became known as Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson, where he eventually served as co-chairman, Mr. Fleischer became one of the top practitioners of the business of mergers and acquisitions, playing a role in a number of major transactions.
Perhaps his highest-profile assignment was advising what was then Philip Morris in its unsolicited takeover bid of Kraft, which led to a $13.1 billion deal in 1988. At the time, it was one of the biggest mergers ever announced.
His line of work, he admitted, could be demanding. “These transactions do not provide opportunity for on-the-job training,” he told The New York Times in 1988. “They require people who can move quickly and can think strategically and are familiar with the kinds of problems that are common to these types of deals.”
Mr. Fleischer also provided legal counsel to BellSouth in its $86 billion sale to AT&T in 2007; to Chevron in its $36 billion takeover of Texaco in 2001; to Bestfoods in its $24 billion sale to Unilever in 2000; and to Dow Jones & Company in its $5.3 billion sale to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.
The Philip Morris battle involved many of the best-known deal makers of the era, with Mr. Fleischer working alongside the star banker Bruce Wasserstein and facing off against Willard Overlock Jr., of Goldman Sachs, and Martin Lipton, a rival lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz.
Mr. Fleischer was often mentioned in the same breath as Mr. Lipton, the creator of the famed poison-pill takeover defense, and Joseph H. Flom, of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.
“Art is one of the three creators of modern takeover law,” Roberta Romano, the co-director of the Yale Law School Center for the Study of Corporate Law, said in 2009 when she presented Mr. Fleischer with an award. “He has been a pioneer in the art of engaging in hostile takeovers and defending against them, from the days when such transactions were novel and not being undertaken by many law firms.”
Arthur Fleischer Jr. was born on Jan. 27, 1933, in Hartford, Conn., the second son of Arthur and Clare (Katzenstein) Fleischer. He grew up in Hartford and Salt Lake City, in a family of scientists: His father was a chemist who worked on battery technology, and his brothers, Allan and Everly, earned doctorates in physics and chemistry.
He assumed he would follow suit. But soon after he took up chemistry during his freshman year at Yale University, the school his father and brothers had attended, he discovered that his talents lay elsewhere.
After he broke his school-issued set of laboratory glassware, a teacher told him, “You’d be a great theoretical scientist, but this is a lab science,” his wife said in an interview.
He decided to major in history, graduating in 1953, and then joined the Army for two years, serving as a typist and working at the Pentagon. He went on to attend Yale Law School and graduated in 1958.
Mr. Fleischer began his career as a tax lawyer at a firm then known as Strasser Spiegelberg. But when his former law school professor William L. Cary became chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission during the Kennedy administration, Mr. Fleischer left to serve as Mr. Cary’s executive assistant in Washington.
It was during his time at the S.E.C. that Mr. Fleischer became interested in practicing securities law, which led to his work on deals. “You were always operating where the law was changing,” he told The Times in 1988. “And it’s an area where the lawyers are very much at the center of the transaction. So it was more satisfying.”
Mr. Fleischer played a significant role in the 1980s merger boom, the era of “Barbarians at the Gate.” In addition to the Kraft Foods takeover battle, he was involved in attempted takeovers of the Hospital Corporation of America, now known as HCA, and the grocery chain Kroger.
Mr. Fleischer recounted his experiences in two books, “Takeover Defense: Mergers and Acquisitions” (originally written with Alexander R. Sussman and currently in its ninth edition), which Ms. Romano described as “the leading treatise on takeover defenses,” and “Board Games: The Changing Shape of Corporate Power” (1988, written with Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr. and Miriam Z. Klipper).
But the law was not his only focus. Mr. Fleischer was one of the most avid art collectors in the world of corporate law, acquiring works by prominent and emerging artists, many of them displayed in Fried Frank’s offices. (In a 2006 interview with The Wall Street Journal, he highlighted works by the photographers Lise Sarfati and Collier Schorr in the firm’s collection.)
He also served on the boards of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Kitchen, a nonprofit experimental art institution, and donated works to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Yale.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Fleischer is survived by two daughters, Elizabeth and Katie Fleischer; two grandsons; and his brother Everly.
