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

The Amazon logo is seen on the outside of the company's YVR2 fulfilment centre, in Delta, B.C., Friday, July 11, 2025. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

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

Federal Court Chief Justice Paul Crampton ruled this month to grant some extensions for document production to Amazon, but not others, finding 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 says the company claimed it would be impossible to comply with 90-day and 120-day deadlines set by the court in July.

The judge ruled that Amazon US, however, had already compiled much of the same material in litigation with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, where more than 100 lawyers were tapped to review the voluminous documentary evidence.

“It is reasonable to expect that Amazon Canada ought to have done the same as Amazon US, much sooner in the process,” Crampton’s ruling says.

The judge said that “experienced lawyers” should be able to review an average of 30 documents per hour, and Amazon Canada was “unrelenting” in insisting it needed eight months to comply with the production order.

The company, the judge found, was operating on its own timetable and “did not proceed as diligently as could reasonably be expected.”

Crampton found the company had given enough evidence to extend the deadline to Dec. 15, but it “failed to justify the reasonableness of its requested extensions beyond Dec. 15, 2025.”

The Competition Bureau said in July that the court order advances the probe launched in 2020 into Amazon’s practices.

The company’s “marketplace fair pricing policy” allows Amazon to charge higher fees to sellers than it otherwise would, and the bureau is investigating whether it “causes sellers to charge higher retail prices to customers.”

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.”

The bureau’s investigation into Amazon Canada’s possible “abuse of dominance” is separate from another investigation into the company’s marketing practices launched last year.

The Competition Bureau is also investigating Amazon over how product ratings and reviews could affect “how products are ranked and displayed on their website and mobile app.”

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

The Canadian Press