President Lindsay Duprey talks about speed, defensibility and keeping human judgment in ediscovery as data volumes climb
The question facing legal teams is no longer whether to adopt artificial intelligence (AI), but how to do so without sacrificing the defensibility litigation demands, says Lindsay Duprey, president of Array Canada.
Duprey has led the ediscovery and litigation support firm in Canada since January 2025, returning to a sector she first entered in the early 2000s after roles at LexisNexis Canada, Ricoh Canada and Commonwealth Legal. The move, she says, was driven by a mix of the familiar and the new.
"For me, coming back into the industry, it really felt like coming home," she says, pointing to a culture "focused on culture and people moving quickly and genuinely working on what's next."
She describes Array not as a software vendor but as something broader. "I like to describe us really as a technology services organization," she says. The firm designs services for commercial litigators, large law firms, enterprises, and public-sector ministries that manage large collections of evidence for litigation or investigations.
Two shifts reshaping legal work
Duprey sees two forces remaking the market at once. The first is impossible to avoid. "You can't go anywhere today without having the discussion around AI," she says. What has changed is the speed, with the technology moving from talking point to deployment so quickly that the question itself has flipped.
"It's no longer about firms saying, 'Is this something we should be considering?' It's actually moving very quickly to yes," she says. The harder problem is doing it responsibly, balancing efficiency against value and the need for governance.
The second shift is a tension between competing demands. "We all want everything to happen quickly, but we also want predictability in the way that we work, and in particular in the legal market. We want defensibility," she says. That pressure, she adds, is forcing service providers like Array to rethink "not just about the tools that we're using, but our workflows, how our organizations are structured."
When the data outgrows the tools
The volume problem has escalated well beyond what most lawyers confronted a decade ago, though Duprey is quick to note it is relative. Early in her career, scale looked very different. "I can remember thinking back to 100 gigabytes was a lot of data, and if you had 10 terabytes, it was, you know, it was exponential," she says. "But we've moved far beyond emails and static documents today."
The complexity now comes from where information lives and how it moves, with collaboration platforms, mobile data and fragmented cloud and on-premise environments replacing the tidy email archive. That sprawl, often carried through informal communication, creates challenges that did not exist 15 or 20 years ago, the same pressure driving how AI software now supports Canada's modern law firms.
AI is the obvious response to the flood, and Duprey is clear that its value is real rather than theoretical. "AI is absolutely delivering in very practical ways," she says, citing faster review of large document collections, sharper prioritization and the removal of manual work needed to structure information, part of a wave that has seen artificial intelligence transforming the legal profession across the country.
Where it stops, she says, is judgment. "I fundamentally believe that that's not the goal," she says of replacing legal reasoning. Her preferred model is collaborative. "I love this expression of the human in the loop," she says, describing AI and people working together "in a way that's transparent, that's defensible and aligned with legal standards. So not AI for AI's sake."
Speed versus control
Defensibility and data sovereignty are where the speed agenda meets its limits, because in litigation, moving fast is not enough on its own. "Speed without the defensibility is really where we're going to create risk," Duprey says, arguing that better processes, not just faster ones, are what let teams move with confidence and within standards such as the Sedona Canada Principles on electronic discovery.
Data sovereignty, she notes, is not new, but the framing has shifted. "It's not just about where the data lives. It's about who controls that data and ultimately what laws can reach that data," she says. For business leaders, the task is to capture the technology's upside while maintaining the right controls.
That balance also reshapes hiring, because technology on its own solves nothing. "Just having the data doesn't equal strategy," she says. Success comes from pairing business acumen with technical understanding and a clear view of the problem at hand. "Those organizations that are successful will combine the people, the right people, with the right process, with the right technology to solve the business problem," she says.
Tool or operating model
Array gets pulled into matters at different points, but Duprey would rather arrive early. "Go slow to go fast," she says, describing how upstream involvement in designing a collection strategy can spare clients "astronomical amounts of data" that may not be relevant. When that is not possible, the firm aims to "meet our customers where they are."
The deeper misconception, in her view, is treating legal technology as a purchase rather than a system. "Buying the technology is easy, really," she says. "The real challenge is actually embedding it into workflows and figuring out how that delivers value." She also pushes back on the idea that law is a laggard, arguing the industry "has been at the forefront of innovation and change" for decades.
Successful adoption, Duprey says, comes down to defining a vision, bringing stakeholders in early, building logical checkpoints and iterating in real time. Above all, it means marking progress along the way. "Celebrate the successes early on, even if they're just small," she says, because momentum builds champions, adoption and better outcomes.
Duprey will join the panel "When evidence is overwhelming: turning mountains of data into legal strategy" at the Canadian Legal Summit in Toronto in October.
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