Right Where He’s Meant to Be
Anton Kaminsky has found his calling as an aggressive attorney who takes a practical approach to helping business owners resolve their disputes.
The path to a dream job isn’t always clear from the outset. To end up in the right place, sometimes a person has to traverse a long and winding road, and overcome multiple obstacles in the process. A little luck never hurt either.
Anton Kaminsky’s thriving law career is a perfect example. A native of Ukraine, Kaminsky came to the United States with his family at age six, without speaking “a lick of English.” He quickly adapted to his new surroundings, made friends he remains close with to this day, and came to think of Philadelphia as home.
In high school, while other kids were obsessing over sports or video games, Kaminsky developed a passion for the stock market. In fact, when Google held its IPO, he vividly remembers badgering his father to buy shares in the company, to no avail.
Throughout his time at Penn State, that interest never waned. In his senior year, after receiving a signing bonus to join a financial company in Virginia following graduation, he promptly allocated the money to trading currency. After a few successful months, he ended up giving the signing bonus back, joined a trading company in New York instead, and settled in for what he thought was going to be a long and fruitful career on Wall Street.
“Here I am, this guy who is primed to trade and pursue my dream job in finance, and the entire financial economy effectively collapses over the next year and a half,” Kaminsky says, referencing the Great Recession of 2008-2009. “So that set me back a lot.”
He moved home to Philly and bounced around at different jobs in the finance sector. He wound up back in New York at a hedge fund, this time commuting two hours each way.
“Eventually it became a thing where I was just miserable and I didn’t want to do it anymore,” he recalls. “That’s when my family pushed me to go to law school.”
So, in his late 20s, Kaminsky found himself back in a classroom. Recently married and with a daughter on the way, he worked full time to provide for his family and attended night courses at Temple University’s Beasley School of Law. It was a challenge, to be sure, but he had finally found his niche.
“I started clerking at [the Philadelphia law firm] Bochetto & Lentz in my third or fourth year of law school,” he says. “I realized, ‘This is amazing. I should have been doing this from day one.’ I love finance and I love business, but I also love arguing with people and I love being right. I’m competitive and I don’t like to lose. I love to do more research and find out why I’m right and you’re wrong. It was like an ‘aha’ moment.”
Kaminsky stayed at Bochetto & Lentz after earning his law degree and spent five years litigating business issues of all types. In 2020, he made another bold decision by going out on his own and forming Kaminsky Law.
His practice focuses on aggressive, practical representation, mostly for owners of small businesses. His financial background and business acumen have proved invaluable, especially in shareholder disputes. He also enjoys digging through research to discover how and why his clients are being wronged.
“I like the strategy of it, and I like being able to help people get out of a bad situation,” he says. “By the time you go to a lawyer, you’ve pretty much exhausted all options. It’s probably a last resort, and if you’re going to spend the money, you want someone who is actually going to help you. That’s a big driver for me.
“If I’m working with a small business,” he continues, “I understand how litigation kills a business and makes the owner of the business dedicate all of their time, effort, and mind space to fighting off this problem. I want to be the person who helps fix that for them. It’s something that makes me feel good about myself and what I do.”
Kaminsky Law also addresses contract issues for business owners, and has branched off into employee representation with the hiring of attorney Aubrie Linder. In addition, the firm can handle cases involving personal injury, defamation, cemetery litigation, and real estate disputes, among others.
“I thank my lucky stars all the time because I could not have foreseen it going the way it has,” says Kaminsky, who plans on hiring another lawyer in the near future. “The firm has grown a lot faster than I expected. I don’t want to pat myself on the back, but I really think it’s because of this concept that I want to help you, I want to be aggressive for you, and at the same time I want to be practical for you.”
In an alternate universe where the recession of 2008 never happened, Kaminsky could very well still be in New York, moving mountains in the world of finance. But deep down, he knows he ended up where he was supposed to be all along, and the self-described “contrarian” will continue to go against herd mentality in building his firm and taking chances to produce the best results for his clients.
“I can’t believe I didn’t know that I was going to be a lawyer when I was 15 hanging out with my friends, because they always said I had to argue just for the sake of argument,” he says with a laugh. “As soon as the herd has been convinced of something, that’s when it’s going to go in another direction. I’m a big proponent of that—just because everyone believes something, that doesn’t mean it’s true. I think that really translates to my advocacy.”
Kaminsky Law
(215) 876-0800 | KaminskyLaw.com
(215) 876-0800 | KaminskyLaw.com
207 Buck Road, Suite 2
Southampton, PA 18966
Southampton, PA 18966
1601 Lombard St., Suite 2A
Philadelphia, PA 19146
Philadelphia, PA 19146
Photo by Alison Dunlap
Published (and copyrighted) in Suburban Life magazine, April 2023.
