Since co-founding the personal injury firm Singer Kwinter 41 years ago, Law’70 alumnus Alf Kwinter has distinguished himself in his field. His firm is among Canadian Lawyer magazine’s top 10 boutiques, and he is considered a leading Canadian legal practitioner in insurance law and personal injury litigation by the international peer-review legal guide Best Lawyers. Most recently, he received the 2015 Award of Excellence in Insurance Law from the Ontario Bar Association (OBA).

“In addition to his active involvement with the OBA’s Insurance Law Section,” says chair Audrey P. Ramsay, “Alf has a reputation for being a dedicated and fair lawyer, has achieved a number of groundbreaking decisions and awards, and is widely respected as one of the foremost insurance law experts in Ontario.”

A certified specialist in civil litigation, Kwinter has appeared at all levels of court. For the plaintiff in Pereira vs. Hamilton Township Farmers Mutual Insurance Company, he won $2.5 million, the largest verdict for punitive damages against an insurance company in the history of the Canadian courts. At the Supreme Court of Canada, his successful argument in Oldfield vs. Transamerica resulted in the landmark decision that the rights of innocent beneficiaries of insurance policies should stand even when the deceased has died in the course of committing a crime. These are just two of the many cases that fellow graduate Justice Darla Wilson, Law’84, referred to in her keynote address at the OBA event.

So what is it that Kwinter finds most rewarding about his work? “It’s representing the ‘little guy’ in litigation against huge corporations with unlimited resources and winning such cases for people who could never afford such lengthy and expensive litigation, except for the contingency fees our system now allows,” he says.

Also important to Kwinter is the fact that he has convinced a court on three separate occasions to punish an insurance company by imposing punitive damages for mistreating plaintiffs. “That makes me hope that insurance companies might think twice before they reject an otherwise fair and legitimate claim.”

Kwinter is one of four Queen’s Law alumni to recently be honoured by the Ontario Bar Association.