A lawyer for Loretta Lee, the ex-Google software engineer who filed a sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and wrongful termination suit against her former employer earlier this year, told BuzzFeed News that a Google attorney “reneged” on the company’s recent announcement to end forced arbitration, saying the policy change would not apply to her ongoing case.

“It’s bizarre,” Richard Hoyer, Lee’s lawyer, told BuzzFeed News. “Google says, ‘We will not force employees into arbitration,’ and [the] response to me taking them up on that is, ‘Oh, we didn’t say when.’ It was a shock to see Google renege on the announcement that [the company] went through a lot of effort to publicize.”

An email reviewed by BuzzFeed News showed that Google lawyer Brian Johnsrud told Hoyer last Friday, “Google announced a prospective policy change that applies going forward to individual sex harassment and sex assault claims. This policy change does not apply retroactively to claims already compelled to arbitration.”

Google told BuzzFeed News that there are a small number of cases that were either already settled in arbitration, or compelled into arbitration, where the company's sexual misconduct policy change wouldn't apply. The company added that its policy change applies to anything not in arbitration already, and applies to both former and current employees.

The Lee case was compelled into arbitration in September. But Hoyer, Lee's lawyer, told BuzzFeed News there still would have been time to appeal the court’s order compelling arbitration when, on the day of the company's announcement that it would end forced arbitration, he contacted Google's lawyer to say Lee elected not to arbitrate her claims. According to emails reviewed by BuzzFeed News, Google’s attorney waited over a week to send a reply stating that the company would still force arbitration for her case; Hoyer said it was the very last day Lee could have appealed.

Many major tech companies have, until recently, preferred to force employees to settle sexual harassment claims in private arbitration, a policy that shields a firm from workers airing their grievances in open court, and also tends to result in lower-cost settlements. In the past, mandated arbitration has silenced women from speaking out about their experiences of harassment. But when thousands of Google employees staged walkouts around the world this month to protest the company’s handling of sexual harassment claims against senior executives, Google conceded to a partial end to mandatory arbitration — for individual sexual harassment and sexual assault claims. (The company has said nothing about discrimination, wage and hour disputes, or other claims.)

