Louis A. Craco, a white-shoe lawyer who in the 1980s helped to expand the pool of volunteer attorneys providing free legal services to people in New York City who could not afford them, died on Feb. 15 in Manhasset, N.Y. He was 86.

The cause was a stroke, his son William Craco said.

Mr. Craco (pronounced CRAY-koh), a partner at Willkie Farr & Gallagher, was a founder in 1984 of Volunteers of Legal Service, a program that more than doubled the amount of time private lawyers donated to public interest work. It had been formed in part to make up for cutbacks by the Reagan administration in federal legal services for the poor.

At the time, he was president of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York — at 50, the youngest ever to hold that post.

Under the program, law firms and corporate legal departments, which together employed 5,000 lawyers, agreed to provide 30 volunteer hours a year per lawyer, mostly to cases involving civil fraud, landlord-tenant disputes and wrongful denial of government benefits.