Robert Joffe, former presiding partner of Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP, died on Jan. 28 at the age of 66 of pancreatic cancer. A litigator for most of his time at Cravath, Joffe advised the boards of several troubled companies in recent years and throughout his career devoted significant time to pro bono work.

"He was a great lawyer," says Bernard Nussbaum, a partner at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz who sat with Joffe on the board of Human Rights First, a nonprofit organization based in Washington. "He was one of those litigators who was as good in the boardroom as he was in the courtroom, and that's not all that usual. He was able to do both with a great deal of élan and class. He had one of the great careers in the law in New York in the last 30 or 40 years."

Much of Joffe's work came from Time Warner Inc. In 1989, he represented longtime Cravath client Time Inc. in the Delaware Court of Chancery as it tried to preserve a proposed merger with Warner Communications Inc. in the face of a hostile bid from Paramount Communications Inc. Chancellor William B. Allen found for Time in what remains one of the most significant takeover cases in Delaware law.

"Bob made a wonderful argument," says Evan Chesler, Joffe's successor as Cravath's presiding partner, who watched the trial on closed-circuit television at Time's offices in New York. "He won on the idea that it was the business of boards to run the business of their corporations. It was clearly the best argument anyone gave that day in that courtroom."

An experienced antitrust lawyer, Joffe also advised Time Warner when it acquired Turner Broadcasting System Inc. in 1996 and America Online Inc. five years later. The Federal Trade Commission conditioned approval of the deal on a consent decree that Joffe negotiated with George Cary, then the deputy director of the FTC's Bureau of Competition and now a partner at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP.

"With Bob, you never had that antagonism, no matter which side of the issue you were on," Cary says. "He was able to relieve the tension and helped you get to the right answer. He was able to depersonalize issues in terms of their adversarial nature and re-personalize them in terms of trying to get to an answer."

In the final years of his career, Joffe built a practice counseling boards of directors. In 2004, he began advising the independent directors of Washington-based Fannie Mae and was at their side when the Treasury Department seized Fannie Mae in September 2008. The next weekend, he represented the independent directors of Merrill Lynch & Co. in that firm's sale to Bank of America Corp. Those assignments and Joffe's work for the independent directors of General Motors Corp. placed him at the center of the financial crisis in the autumn of 2008.

Joffe was committed to pro bono work from his law student years. He graduated from Harvard College in 1964 and immediately matriculated at Harvard Law School, where he was the case notes editor for first issues of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review. He became an associate at Cravath after his 1967 graduation from Harvard but within months moved to Malawi, where he spent two years on a Ford Foundation fellowship working with the country's Ministry of Justice. Joffe returned to Cravath in 1969 and made partner six years later.

In 1989 he argued Martin v. Wilks pro bono before the Supreme Court, a case where he represented black firefighters defending a suit brought by white counterparts led by Robert Wilks, who claimed they should not be subject to a 1974 consent decree that mandated Birmingham, Ala., hire and promote minorities. The court ruled 5-4 for Wilks, though the Civil Rights Act of 1991 reduced the impact of the decision.

Joffe also served on the boards of numerous nonprofit organizations, including that of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he was on the 12-member committee that chose Thomas Campbell as the successor to Philippe de Montebello in 2008.

"He was clearly a guy you could turn to if you needed something done," says Nussbaum. "He was a person of his word, and he was very effective in fostering his ideals and his ideas. He wasn't just a talker or a pontificator. When he spoke, people listened, and he delivered in terms of charitable contributions and in terms of work."

Joffe is survived by his wife, Virginia Joffe, two children, two stepchildren, two grandchildren, his mother and two brothers.