Jerome Facher , a Boston lawyer who successfully defended a tannery accused of water pollution that plaintiffs linked to a cluster of childhood leukemia deaths — a case that became the basis of a best-selling book and a Hollywood movie — died on Sept. 19 at his home in Arlington, Mass. He was 93 .

His death was confirmed by his daughter Gillian Facher.

The case, recounted in Jonathan Harr ’s book “A Civil Action” (1995) and in a 1998 film by the same name, centered on a liability suit filed in 1982 by eight families in Woburn, Mass., a Boston suburb. The families accused the tannery’s parent company, the Chicago conglomerate Beatrice Foods, and the chemical company W.R. Grace, which had a manufacturing plant nearby, of dumping toxic chemicals that from the 1950s to the ’70s had seeped into the neighborhood’s groundwater.

Mr. Facher (pronounced fasher) was on retainer to Beatrice, his biggest corporate client, which had recruited him because of his reputation as a ferocious litigator. By the early 1980s he had tried some 60 cases and lost very few.

But Mr. Facher feared that Beatrice would be doomed in the Woburn litigation if the families testified in court about their agonizing struggles with the cancer and other ailments that afflicted as many as a dozen neighborhood children, who had been exposed to water from two contaminated city wells. The wells were finally shut in 1979.