SAN FRANCISCO—On Wednesday morning, Kleiner Perkins’ lead lawyer, the direct and animated Lynne Hermle, told the jury that the closing arguments they heard the day before from Ellen Pao’s lawyer, Alan Exelrod, were a pack of lies.

“Ellen Pao’s failure to succeed at KP had nothing to do with gender or retaliation,” Hermle said.

Hermle is in the position of defending Kleiner Perkins from accusations made by Pao, a former junior partner who claims that the firm was a boys' club that discriminated against women and failed to promote her over less-qualified men. Pao has also claimed that the firm did not take reasonable steps to stop harassment in the workplace and that when she complained, senior members of the firm retaliated against her and eventually fired her.

If the jury decides in favor of Pao, Kleiner could stand to lose up to $16 million in compensatory damages, potentially millions more in punitive damages. The lauded Silicon Valley venture capital firm could also find its squeaky-clean reputation in the investment industry sullied if Pao’s claims are upheld.

A sneaky trick

Hermle started her closing arguments late Tuesday afternoon by telling the jury that Pao, contrary to her own testimony, did not bring this lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins because she’s some feminist hero hoping to make the world a better place for her fellow colleagues. Instead, Hermle said, Pao routinely diminished the accomplishments of other women in order to get a payout for herself.

“You heard that [Kleiner investors] Mary Meeker and Beth Sidenberg didn’t come in as managing members, something both of them firmly rejected—but Ellen Pao knows better,” Hermle said, her words dripping with sarcasm. “Over and over again you heard unsubstantiated allegations about other women," but despite the wrongs Pao claimed they all suffered, "none of them chose to join Ms. Pao” in her lawsuit against Kleiner.

“Once she [Pao] understood that she wasn’t succeeding at Kleiner Perkins, and while her job search wasn’t working out, Ellen Pao turned to lawsuits to get the big payout… she chose this path that she thought it would lead to a multimillion dollar windfall for herself,” Hermle said.

Hermle suggested that Pao never showed a track record of wanting to help other women besides herself. Instead of making increasingly hostile complaints in 2011 and 2012, Pao could have started a coaching program or a mentorship program headed by newly hired senior women Mary Meeker or Beth Sidenberg. But no, instead Pao only had “one purpose—a huge payout for Team Ellen.”

Advantaged, not disadvantaged

Hermle told the jury that evidence showed that Pao, in fact, had a head start compared to all the other junior partners that were hired before and after her. She had a close mentorship relationship with John Doerr, she was paid more money than her junior partner peers. But “she didn’t want to play for team Kleiner Perkins, she wanted to play for Team Ellen… and time after time she made it perfectly clear that she was not a fit for the team-based culture at Kleiner Perkins.”

Playing on Pao’s Princeton engineering degree and her Harvard law and business degrees, Hermle told the jury that Pao’s elitist attitude was the reason for her petulant refusal to take constructive criticism. “Because she believed that she was already an outstanding performer, she refused to believe that [she was struggling].”

“Maybe because of her record of academic achievements, she was already a success in her own mind," and she didn't need to fix the problems that kept coming up in her yearly performance reviews, Hermle said. The lawyer added that Kleiner senior partner Matt Murphy didn’t get a board seat at all in his first five years at Kleiner, and other junior partners only got board seats on companies they actually founded.

But “when Ellen Pao worked on Team JD [the name for John Doerr’s group of supporting staff], she got a board seat early, and not on a company she founded,” Hermle asserted.

Hermle then attacked how Pao’s lawyer recounted events: “Do not believe what you heard,” she demanded. “Do not buy the incredible allegation that John Doerr turned on her.”

Instead, according to Hermle, when Pao complained, Doerr asked Pao to write up a list of issues that women face at Kleiner Perkins. He offered to help her on an exit strategy when it was clear she wasn’t happy, the attorney said.

How to get promoted

“Perhaps one of the most meritless, frivolous allegations that you’ve heard… and there were a lot of them, was that Ellen Pao was not mentored and that she was not promoted based on gender,” Hermle said. The attorney launched into a litany of negative comments from Pao’s performance reviews over her seven years at Kleiner.

Pao, Hermle said, had never been in an investing role before coming to Kleiner Perkins and had never started her own company. She even dragged out Kleiner’s favorite dead horse term—“thought leader”—saying Pao just wasn’t one.

On the other hand, the three men who were promoted to senior partner when Pao was not—Wen Hseih, Amol Deshpande, and Chi-Hua Chien—all had some combination of prior experience investing, experience founding their own companies, or a proven ability to uncover good investments.

“What you didn't hear from any witness was that a characteristic for promotion, a box you had to check, had to do with realizing revenue,” Hermle said to counter Pao’s lawyer’s claim that she was the only junior partner who made money for the firm at the time of promotion.

“That would be a crazy standard, as [Harvard Business School] Professor Gompers testified,” Hermle continued. “Investments take an incredibly long time to mature.”

Hermle also refuted that Kleiner Perkins management didn’t promote Pao because she was complaining too much about the culture, saying that the decision not to promote Pao occurred six months before her December 2011 conversation with John Doerr in which she told him women had a tougher time at Kleiner Perkins than men. Instead, the reason was simply that “Ellen Pao was not succeeding at Kleiner Perkins. Even a fool could see that. And Ellen Pao was not a fool,” so she started collecting e-mails and taking notes so she could sue if she didn’t succeed, Hermle charged.

“Of course it was no shame to not succeed as a venture capitalist” given the rigors of the job, Kleiner’s lawyer told the jury. But unlike Pao’s colleagues who accepted their failure and moved on, Pao “would not accept that outcome. Whether for her success after her 10 years in academics, or for some other reason… she just couldn’t accept that she wouldn’t be promoted.”

To prove gender discrimination, Hermle reminded her audience, Pao must prove that gender was a substantial motivating factor. And given Pao’s record, and the records of her peers, could the jury see gender as a substantial factor, she asked?

In his closing arguments, Pao’s lawyer admitted that Kleiner had the best track record on hiring women in the venture capital world, but that it wasn’t good enough, saying that robbing one bank doesn’t absolve you from being a criminal if someone else robbed five banks. Hermle addressed the strained analogy. “I don’t even know how to begin to respond to the statement that hiring these accomplished women is analogous to robbing banks,” she said. “But I suspect it’s a sad attempt to distract you.”

Hermle continued, “please don’t fall for the meritless and disrespectful suggestion that either Beth Sidenberg or Trae Vassallo or Mary Meeker were promoted for any reason related to Ellen Pao’s lawsuit… this is just another example of Ellen Pao trying to take credit” for the work of others.

“If gender bias had actually existed at Kleiner Perkins, she [Pao] wouldn’t have had the opportunities that she had at day one,” Hermle asserted. “She wouldn’t have had the salary that was higher than her colleagues.”

“There was and is no gender discrimination at Kleiner Perkins, where very strong and accomplished women succeed,” Hermle said, pointing to a slide with the images of senior partners like Mary Meeker, Beth Sidenberg, Juliet de Baubigny, and three others. “Each one of them testified that discrimination did not exist. Not one of them confirmed the allegations. These are the people who would know there was sexism and discrimination.”