Picture this: It’s Aug. 28, 1999, a
beautiful summer day. You’re 17,
standing on the beach at Lake
Huron with a friend. You’re an
experienced swimmer and an athlete. Your friend dashes into the
waves a few feet to your left and
leaps, dolphin-backed, into the
surf. He’s way ahead of you, challenging you to follow.
You steel yourself for the chill of
the water and sprint into the lake,
following your pal in. You arc into
the water, head-first, hands in
front of you. You’ve done this many
times—you know the drill for diving into a lake.
Then all hell breaks loose: It’s
like you’ve dived into a brick wall
underwater. For a moment you
sense a terrible pain in your neck.
You lie floating face down in the
water, and, dreamlike, you see
you’re floating over a large mound
of sand…and all fades to nothing.
And that dire accident is at
once the last step you’ll take
unassisted, but the first step in a
classic personal injury lawsuit
that might never have settled—save for a chance hallway
conversation between a young victim and a lawyer with a sixth
sense for a liability case.
BRENDAN
HOWLEY
Like any good litigator, Alf
Kwinter always has an eye for the
main chance, which in this case
was a quadriplegic young man in a
wheelchair in his office, discussing
a paratransit issue. The wheel-chair-bound 19-year-old was there
on another matter when Kwinter
asked him what he’d done to win
compensation for the loss of a normal life at such a young age.
He said he’d made the rounds of
the personal injury law firms. No
lawyer he’d consulted believed
there was any liability—his case
was a no-hoper. Kwinter guided the
young man (anonymized by court
order; settlement quantum sealed)
into his office for an interview,
launching a 12-year pilgrimage
through trial, reversal upon appeal
and a remarkable settlement.
The Pinery Provincial Park is an
idyllic place of white sand beaches
that run for kilometres. On sum-
mer weekends, thousands flock to
the lakeside. But in Pinery’s waters
were a legal no-man’s-land, until
Alf Kwinter and associate Jason
Singer began researching the law of
personal injuries at public beaches.
Firms that refer traumatic
and complex personal injury
matters to Singer, Kwinter do
so with confidence.
They know their reputations will be
enhanced and their valued relationships
will be protected. Singer, Kwinter is
widely respected by the legal profession
having obtained record-setting awards
and settlements and ground-breaking
decisions that changed the law in Canada.
Alfred M. Kwinter**
William A. McMaster
Jason F. Katz
Jason D. Singer
Shane H. Katz
Ari J. Singer
REFERRAL FEES RESPECTED
*As named by Canadian Lawyer magazine
**Certified by The Law Society as a Specialist in Civil Litigation
CHOSEN
ASONEOF
CANADA’STOP
FIVEPERSONAL
INJURYLAW
FIRMS*
1033 Bay Street, Suite 214, Toronto, ON M5S 3A5 • 416 961 2882
referrals@singerkwinter.com singerkwinter.com
Singer
water sandbars offshore.
Damages were agreed to. At
trial, the plaintiff’s mother told
court that when she inspected the
lake within days of the accident,
she found the levels of the sand-
bars beneath the water’s surface
were “all over the place…in some
cases eight feet deep, in others
ankle-deep.”
Kwinter and Singer are nothing
if not thorough: they discovered an
academic expert on sandbars
whose life work included the move-
ments of the Pinery’s offshore sand
formations.
Brian Greenwood, a sediment-
ary geologist at the University of
Toronto Scarborough, gave evi-
dence at trial before Justice Blenus
Wright that he had never con-
sidered the hazards to swimmers of
the moving sandbars, but also that
the plaintiff could not have pre-
dicted when and where those haz-
ards might be. The trial judge held
that the plaintiff must have known
he faced the hazards of the “bottom
of the lake,” despite both the plain-
tiff’s and Greenwood’s evidence
that the diving youth had not struck
the lake bottom but rather a sand-
bar. Greenwood added that when
the lake surface is rippled or in
waves, it’s impossible to see beneath
the water surface, precisely the case
the day of the accident.
Brendan Howley, a former freelance investigative reporter for
CBC-TV’s The Fifth Estate, has
covered court matters in Ontario
since 1989.
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