Robert E. Denham, a mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer who was known for parachuting into imperiled companies and splintered board rooms and steering the organizations out of trouble, died on Saturday at his home in Pasadena, Calif. He was 79.

His family said the cause was cancer.

Soft-spoken, erudite and strategic, Mr. Denham had a knack for being calm under pressure, listening before talking and not necessarily taking the lawyerly path to a resolution. Those traits led Warren E. Buffett to ask Mr. Denham to help him save the Wall Street firm Salomon Brothers in August 1991, when a bid-rigging scandal threatened to push it into insolvency.

Mr. Buffett was the bank’s largest shareholder and had taken the extraordinary step of joining it, as its interim chairman, for a $1 salary. Despite meeting resistance internally, he wanted to come clean with prosecutors and regulators to save the bank, whose traders were accused of rigging the auction market for Treasury securities. Mr. Buffett believed that if the government filed criminal charges, customers would pull their money and the firm would collapse.

Mr. Buffett knew Mr. Denham,ijogo who worked at Munger, Tolles & Olson, a law firm started by Buffett’s business partner and longtime friend Charles T. Munger. Mr. Denham, then living in Los Angeles, had a full plate of clients and little need for the high-wire act of trying to bail out a bank. But he quickly said yes.

“It was clear to me we needed an outstanding lawyer from the outside that would be available on a moment’s notice for what looked like an insurmountable problem,” Mr. Buffett said in a phone interview. “The last thing he needed was a call from someone in New York who was in trouble, but he didn’t hesitate.”

Mr. Denham moved to New York and helped Mr. Buffett persuade prosecutors not to pursue criminal charges against the bank. Instead, the two men were forthright with regulators and reached a $290 million settlement.

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“They took materials that came into my possession approximately 20 years ago and are unrelated to my work with the New York City Police Department,” Mr. Donlon said in a news release issued by the department shortly after 11 p.m. “This is not a department matter, and the department will not be commenting.”

But today, a combo plate of economics, demographics and climate science may accomplish what years of official hand-wringing could not: loosening the grip that super-size restaurant portions have on the national diet.

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