Boies Schiller Partner Robert Silver Dead at 58

Boies, Schiller & Flexner senior partner Robert B. Silver was found dead in a Miami hotel room on Monday, Feb. 2. He was 58.

“Bobby” Silver was one of the closest confidants of David Boies, who fondly referred to him as “my brain.” Fortune has an extensive obiturary with comments from friends and colleagues.

After graduating from Yale Law School in 1982, Silver clerked for 2^nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Jon O. Newman and then joined Cravath, Swaine & Moore. He worked with Boies on the era-defining IBM and Texaco-Pennzoil antitrust litigations before returning to Yale Law as a faculty fellow. When Boies left Cravath in May 1997, his first call was to Silver, as Boies recounted in this article.

He served as a member of the Boies Schiller executive committee, and was an indispensable teammate and legal architect of many of the firm’s most famous cases, including Bush v. Gore, the successful case against California's Prop. 8 gay-marriage ban, and the collected legal works of Hank Greenberg. Most recently, Silver has helped Boies forge a novel legal strategy against the U.S. government in the Court of Federal Claims, asserting the government wrongfully took over AIG, costing Greenberg and other shareholders $25B.

Although he was noted as the behind-the-scenes architect of vaunted and clever legal strategies, he was also acclaimed as an outstanding lawyer in his own right, having received recognition as one of the nation’s leading lawyers on numerous occasions.