Judge says Amazon needed 100 lawyers to assess 2.25 M documents in competition probe

OTTAWA — A Federal Court judge says Amazon Canada should have hired “at least 100 lawyers” to go through more than 2 million documents, in order to meet court-ordered deadlines in an investigation into potentially anti-competitive conduct.

Federal Court Chief Justice Paul Crampton says in an explanation of his ruling to grant some extensions for document production to Amazon, but not others, that 100 lawyers could finish a review of the 2.25 million documents in 15 weeks.

He calculates that by working 10 hours a day, five days a week, and reviewing an average of 30 documents per hour, each lawyer would have to assess “no more than approximately 22,500 documents” each for the probe by the country’s commissioner of competition.

The ruling released this week and dated Nov. 5 says the company claimed it would be impossible to comply with 90-day and 120-day deadlines set by the court in July.

The Competition Bureau said in July that it launched the probe into Amazon’s “marketplace fair pricing policy” which penalizes sellers for setting item prices “significantly higher than recent prices offered on Amazon or elsewhere.”

The Competition Bureau says it’s trying to determine if the policy results in higher prices for consumers, prevents market entry by lower-priced rivals or lessens “price competition among online marketplaces or retail channels.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 25, 2025.