Alan D’Silva

First Year of Call
Ontario, 1989

Areas of Practice
Commercial Litigation

Description
Alan D’Silva is a partner in the Litigation & Dispute Resolution Group. He is considered a leading litigation lawyer in Canada with expertise in a number of areas of law, including defence of class actions, corporate/commercial disputes, securities litigation, shareholder/oppression cases, large insurance litigation, accountants’ and auditors’ negligence, professional negligence, sports law and directors’ and officers’ claims. Alan has served on the Management Committee in the Toronto office.

Alan has acted as counsel in more than 200 publicly reported cases and has extensive experience at all levels of court, and before administrative tribunals, including more than 100 appeals in Canadian appellate courts and 13 cases in the Supreme Court of Canada since 2001. He has also acted as a mediator, arbitrator and an expert witness in Canadian courts.

Alan is a recipient of the University of Ottawa Law School’s 2015 Alumni Award and has been inducted to the Common Law Honour Society, which is described as the Law School’s most prestigious alumni distinction. Alan has also achieved national recognition as one of the top 25 Most Influential Lawyers in Canada by Canadian Lawyer magazine.

Alan is a Fellow in The Trial Lawyer Honorary Society of the Litigation Counsel of America since 2018, a by invitation only membership. He was also appointed as an Arbitrator for the International Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in 2019, where he is one of only a small group of worldwide arbitrators to hear professional and amateur sports cases to the CAS. In 2022, Alan became a resident member of Arbitration Place as an arbitrator and mediator, providing dispute resolution services to domestic and international counsel and parties.

Professional Activities
Alan has taught class actions, appeals and judicial reviews as an Adjunct Professor at University of Toronto Faculty of Law and at the University of Western Ontario Law School; class actions as a visiting Professor at the University of Ottawa Law School; and constitutional law as a guest lecturer at the University of Windsor Law School. He is a former instructor at Osgoode Hall Law School’s Intensive Trial Advocacy Course and taught civil litigation and legal writing for the Law Society’s Bar Admission Course.

Alan is a current member of the International Association of Defense Counsel (IADC), a by invitation only membership. He has also served as Chair of the Northwind Class Actions Invitational Forum at Langdon Hall, Cambridge, as a member of the board of directors for The Advocates’ Society and Chair of the Standing Committee and its Task Force on the Report on Retention of Women in the Profession. He was part of the Executive Committee OBA Insurance Section, former Counsel of Ontario Human Rights Commission, and was a member of the Equity Advisory Group for the Law Society of Ontario.

Background
Alan is a former and current board member or committee member of several charitable or non-profit organizations, universities and hospitals. He is the past President of a large Ratepayers’ Association and is a recognized member of the University of Ottawa’s Tabaret Society and the R. Fraser Elliott Society for charitable contributions.