Democratic Data Company Civis Analytics Adds Comcast Lawyer

Civis Analytics, a data science company with Democratic roots that recently raised $31 million, has hired former Comcast Corp. lawyer Laura Belmont as its new top lawyer.

Belmont officially joined the company as general counsel in early June, months after former legal chief Richard Lee left Chicago-based Civis to launch his legal technology business New Era ADR.

Civis was spun out of Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign by data scientist Dan Wagner. It has done audience analytics for both Obama and President Joe Biden’s campaigns.

The company counts former Alphabet Inc. CEO Eric Schmidt among its investors, and this month it raised the nearly $31 million in a Series B funding round. Civis Analytics now works with a range of clients including the American Red Cross, the United Nations Refugee Agency, and iHeartRadio, according to its website.

“I see this general counsel role at Civis as really the culmination of my prior work experiences,” Belmont told Bloomberg Law.

“I started my career in nonprofits, then transitioned to private practice, I worked in-house, and then even recently at a political campaign,” she said. “At Civis, I get to bring all of that together and really marry my interests, and help businesses thrive while serving our communities at the same time.”

Belmont was most recently assistant deputy general counsel for Comcast Cable, where she worked for nearly five years. Before that, she was an associate with Latham & Watkins, an attorney for the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, and a policy analyst for the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation.

Belmont has also worked with the Pennsylvania Democratic Party as a regional voter protection director during the 2020 presidential election, and she is a member of in-house counsel professional group TechGC.

“My top priority now, and for as long as I’m in this role, is going to be building trust,” Belmont said. “Our clients trust us to be stewards of their data, and we take that responsibility really seriously.”

Last October, Civis was accused of firing employees in violation of federal labor law and not living up to its progressive values days before the presidential election.

Around a dozen former employees said they were terminated suddenly because they vocalized opinions about the company’s business practices and attempted to organize a union, and some of them later filed a charge with the National Labor Relations Board. The charge was dismissed earlier this year, and an appeal was denied in July.

Wagner told New York Magazine that the layoffs occurred due to overstaffing. In a statement emailed to Bloomberg Law, Civis said they took the claims seriously though there were “some half-truths and exaggerations.”

“We recognize that the claims made in the article are, without context, concerning,” the statement said. “We investigated and addressed each statement internally.”