Joseph Kelner, a lawyer who took on the sitting governor of Ohio, a former university president and the National Guard in a suit on behalf of the student victims of the Kent State shootings in 1970, died on Monday in Manhasset, N.Y. He was 98.

The death was confirmed by his son Robert.

Mr. Kelner, who was president of both the New York State Trial Lawyers Association and the American Trial Lawyers Association, was a trial specialist who concentrated on personal injury and medical malpractice cases.

Mr. Kelner took on a number of notable clients, including, for a time, Bernhard H. Goetz, the so-called subway vigilante, who became a lightning rod in a national debate about crime, race and guns in December 1984 when he, a white man, shot four black teenagers who he claimed had tried to rob him in a subway car.

But even more significant was the Kent State case. On May 4, 1970, after a weekend of student rallies against the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia — an R.O.T.C. building was set afire during the protests — National Guardsmen called to the campus by Gov. James A. Rhodes shot into a crowd of demonstrators, killing four students and wounding nine others.