Dennis Mullins ’81

Member of Adelphi University’s Profiles in Success program.

Senior Partner, Mendes and Mount, LLP

Driven to Succeed

Achievement has long been important to Dennis Mullins ’81. “I wanted to be successful,” he says. “I knew I was going to be the first member of my family to go to college and have a professional career.”

Despite Mr. Mullin’s ambitions, his path to a Manhattan law office overlooking Times Square was anything but straight and easy. Mullins, the son of a volunteer firefighter, whose family has a long tradition of public service, earned his associate’s degree in criminal justice from Nassau County Community College. He pursued his bachelor’s degree, ultimately transferring to Adelphi with one year of course work remaining. Even then, he was constantly juggling school and work.

“After class, I was always running off campus to some job,” he recalls. “I used to study whenever I had a few minutes’ time, but I was really driven by the thought of failure.”

After Adelphi, he enrolled immediately in law school. Mullins succeeded in finishing his Juris Doctor in three years, despite transferring in the middle of his program from Oklahoma City University to Golden Gate University. In 1984, he returned to the East Coast to accept a job offer from the New York firm Mendes and Mount.

Mullins worked at Mendes and Mount for 25 years, serving as a practice group leader for the Professional Liability group for many of them. Often representing foreign insurers, including Lloyd’s of London, he headed a legal team responsible for coordinating the roles of the many firms who were insured with his clients and often bought towers of coverage that were in the hundreds of millions of dollars. In addition to working with the firms that bought such coverage, Mullins worked with their counsel and coordinated the positions of dozens of companies subscribed to such significant coverage.

In April 2009, Mullins became the chairman of Huntersure, LLC, a managing general agent and managing general underwriter that currently manages over a dozen different programs for various domestic and London insurers. He specializes in writing law firm and accountants’ errors and omissions coverage. Though his office was originally in Manhattan, as the company grew, Mullins moved into a new office in Garden City in 2012.

When he’s not working, Mullins serves as the president of the Men’s Association of Garden City High School, which raises funds to support various student programs. He and his wife have three successful children.

“I always knew what I wanted; I was passionate about it,” he says. “These days, I try hard to instill that same passion and hunger in my kids.”