After abrupt resignation, legal tech CEO faces groping allegations
Kiwi Camara, 39, stepped down Sept. 11 as CEO of the software company CS Disco. Photo by Bjakub, CC-BY-SA-4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Legal technology CEO Kiwi Camara’s resignation last week has been followed by a new report suggesting that the executive allegedly groped a young female employee at a company dinner.
Camara, 39, stepped down Sept. 11 as CEO of the software company CS Disco. But before his departure, it was claimed that during a Sept. 6 dinner with employees at a restaurant in Austin, Texas, he shoved roasted meat into the face of the woman and then groped her, according to a report published Wednesday in the Wall Street Journal.
The report, which relied on interviews with more than a dozen current and former CS Disco employees and people with knowledge of the matter, details how Camara then tried to persuade the woman, who “was visibly uncomfortable,” to go back to his condo.
Other employees at the dinner at the Peacock Mediterranean Grill in Austin, Texas, reported the incident to the company’s human resources department the same night, according to the report, which adds that the law firm Cooley investigated the complaint.
Co-founded by Camara in 2013 when he was 29 years old, CS Disco provides e-discovery, document review and case management software to firms. Camara left the company, which went public in 2021, without taking stock options worth almost $110 million, according to the newspaper.
In 2018, a lawsuit filed in Austin, Texas, federal court alleging age and gender discrimination claimed that Camara would review photos of female receptionists before hiring them, “a practice he didn’t follow for men,” according to the report.
Then in early 2022, the company’s ethics hotline received a complaint from an employee who asked for an investigation into Camara’s behavior with young female employees. Several former employees told the Wall Street Journal that they had raised concerns with executives and human resources but “felt nothing changed.”
Camara did not respond to the newspaper’s requests for comment.
In a Sept. 11 news release announcing that he was stepping down, and that Scott Hill, a member of the board of directors, would replace him on an interim basis, Camara said it was “an incredible experience growing this business from an idea to an industry leader.”
“Disco is in excellent hands. I have every confidence in Scott Hill and the Disco team as they manage this transition and carry on Disco’s proud tradition of combining world-class engineering with a deep love and respect for the law to build product experiences that lawyers love,” Camara said in prepared remarks.
