Who

Joffe is a partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore and a renowned anti-trust expert. Cravath's presiding partner through 2006, he handed the reigns to Evan Chesler at the end of 2007.

Backstory

Joffe earned both his B.A. and his J.D. at Harvard, and joined Cravath as an associate in 1967. Two years later, he was off to Africa, having taken a hiatus to work at the Ministry of Justice in Malawi on a Ford Foundation grant. Joffe returned to the firm and made partner in 1975. During the '70s he started working with longtime Cravath client Time Inc.—Cravath's relationship to the media company dates back to the '20s—and he's been looking after them ever since. In the '80s, he came to the rescue of Time's HBO unit after a handful of movie studios threatened to boycott the cable network. Several years later, he worked on the landmark merger that brought Time Inc. and Warner Communications under one roof. In 1996, Joffe handled the company's acquisition of Ted Turner's Turner Broadcasting System; four years later, he worked on what will go down as the largest deal of his career, the merger of AOL and Time Warner. Working alongside fellow Cravath partner Robert Kindler (who handled the M&A side of things), Joffe spent nearly a year of billable hours pushing the $100 billion deal past regulators. The deal provided quite the payday for Cravath, as there was a contingency arrangement: $35 million if the deal went through, less than half of that if it didn't. $35 million it was.

In 2006, Joffe came to the aid of then-Time Warner CEO Dick Parsons after Carl Icahn made a bid to seize control of the company's board. Joffe went head-to-head with Icahn (and Icahn's pit bull banker Bruce Wasserstein) and prevailed. Other recent notable cases for Joffe: He represented two members of the board of directors of the New York Stock Exchange in connection with Eliot Spitzer's investigation into Dick Grasso's pay package.

Board game

Joffe is on the board of the After-School Corporation, an education non-profit. He's also on the board of trustees at the Met along with Richard Chilton, William Rudin, Michel David-Weill, and Daniel Brodsky, among others.

Personal

Joffe is married to Virginia Joffe, a photographer. He has four kids, two with Virginia and two with his first wife, Selby Hickey. Joffe and Virginia live in a co-op on West End Avenue.