Date: August 7th, 2019 6:29 PM
Author: razzle-dazzle roast beef whorehouse
You mean KAD Camara? lol
Meet the executive team
(success is built on a strong foundation)
https://www.csdisco.com/about-us
As we mentioned this morning, K.A.D. (Kiwi) Camara was on the wrong side of the news cycle yesterday.
A federal jury ruled that his client, Jammie Thomas-Rasset, violated copyrights on 24 songs she downloaded, and hit her with a whopping $1.92 million judgment — which works out to $80,000 per downloaded song.
https://abovethelaw.com/2009/06/80000-per-song-could-backfire-says-k-a-d--camara/
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/article/Entrepreneur-has-made-a-discovery-filled-journey-5569031.php
Entrepreneur has made a discovery-filled journey
His office near the Galleria looks more Silicon Valley than Vinson & Elkins, fitting for a Harvard-trained lawyer turned Houston software entrepreneur. The walls are adorned with playful pop art. A stuffed animal, a white harbor seal, is on his desk.
Seated there is Kiwi Camara, a babyfaced 30-year-old wearing an open-collared shirt under a tan sport coat, a young man in cowboy boots who moved here seven years ago with impressive credentials for someone of any age. At 11, he wrote a paper on alternative treatments for rheumatoid arthritis and got it published in the Hawaii Journal of Medicine. He skipped high school and studied computer science and math as an undergraduate. At 16, he became the youngest student in Harvard Law School history.
Now he runs CS Disco, an emerging player in the burgeoning e-discovery industry, a technology-driven field that is expected to reach almost $10 billion in annual revenue in 2017, up from $3.6 billion in 2010, according to market research firm Transparency Market Research.
Last December, the company raised $2 million from Austin-based venture capital firm LiveOak Venture Partners, which allowed CS Disco to double its engineering staff.
"We expect to double it again by the end of the year," Camara said.
Camara, who was born in Manila and raised primarily in Hawaii, moved to Houston at the urging of a close friend from law school, and in 2009 they co-founded Camara & Sibley. The partners would spend millions on legal discovery software, which Camara says he found lacking.
So he put in $400,000, hired two engineers and in January 2013 created his own e-discovery software company. By November, he said, CS Disco was turning a profit. Sales revenues have been growing an average of more than 20 percent per month, he said.
Camara counts more than 130 clients and said the company charges clients from a few hundred dollars a month for the smallest case to $40,000 a month for the largest. The company has 14 employees, including sales personnel.
A fairly new area
Legal discovery software is a relatively new field, said Roger Fulghum, who heads the intellectual property rights division of the Houston office of law firm Baker Botts.
Fifteen years ago, when people did legal discovery work, they had to sift through "boxes and boxes" of paper documents usually housed in space called a war room, Fulghum said, but today documents are imaged and managed electronically.
"You can put all the information on a hard drive, which makes moving your materials to a remote trial site in another city that much easier," he said.
In large cases, lawyers may have to find evidence buried in millions of emails and documents collected from dozens of witnesses around the world, Camara said. A company like CS Disco takes the data and puts it in a form that lets lawyers search and classify, or "tag," the data to find evidence that they want for the case, he said.
Clients pay CS Disco for access to its software based on the amount of data involved.
From his desk computer, Camara gave a demonstration. He called up the CS Disco homepage and clicked on "Live Demo."
The sample demo gives the user access to 385,000 Enron emails. He typed in a few search words and an Enron email popped up: "This week is no good. I have too large a pile of documents to shred."
"Competition is intense in the e-discovery industry, and you're not seeing clear winners and losers," said Barry Murphy, senior vice president of product marketing at Pasadena, Calif.-based X1, a search and e-discovery software company. The services side of the industry is booming, he said, because many companies are slow to understand how to use advanced technology on their own.
Among the leading revenue-generating e-discovery software companies are Symantec Clearwell, Nuix, Transperfect Digital Reef, Lexis Nexis Concordance and kCura, Murphy said, along with his own company, X1.
Fulghum's department at Baker Botts uses a number of discovery software tools, and he hasn't tried CS Disco, he said.
Ben Garry, an associate at the Houston office of litigation firm Diamond McCarthy, uses several e-discovery softwares, including CS Disco, and he said CS Disco gives him more independence and enables him to work faster at a relatively inexpensive price.
'Channel partners'
Camara said he markets his software through a network of local "channel partners" who provide litigation support services throughout the U.S. and London.
The "Disco" in the company's name is short for discovery.
A Google search of Camara's name reveals that, during his first year at Harvard Law School, he sparked a campus controversy after using a racially offensive term in a long written summary of a Supreme Court decision involving race discrimination and then posting it on a website for students. He later expressed his regret and said he was "very sorry" for the pain he caused.
'Well covered' issue
But the incident continued to draw attention and may have cost Camara a teaching job at George Mason University's School of Law, according to a 2007 Washington Post article.
"The issue has been well covered, and I have nothing else to say about it," he says now.
Camara taught law at Northwestern University before moving to Houston to partner with his law school friend, Joe Sibley, who is from Houston.
Sibley served as a U.S. Army Ranger before entering law school and was one of the oldest students, but he and the youngest student, Camara, became best friends.
Camara saw Houston for the first time when he moved here in 2007.
"I love it," he said, "although I am still adjusting to the summers."
For fun, he said, he rides horses in Tomball and plays chess.
Camara said owning a business is a more efficient way to make a living than practicing law.
An entrepreneur can build something and sell it over and over, he said, as opposed to law, in which he had to do custom work for each client.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3828910&forum_id=2#38653237)