Three more women have been permitted to join a class-action lawsuit that accuses Bloomberg L.P., the financial services and media company founded by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, of discriminating against pregnant employees, a federal judge said Thursday.

The three, who only came forward in the past couple of weeks, bring to 79 the number of plaintiffs in the case. But Judge Loretta A. Preska of Federal District Court in Manhattan, clearly eager to pick up the pace of the long-running case, declared that they would be the last three.

“We have finished identifying claimants, and thus there will be no more claimants,” Judge Preska said. “Discovery is complete.”

The judge’s comments came at the end of an unusually testy 90-minute procedural hearing, in which both sides haggled over, and were frequently confused by, all sorts of legal and semantic arguments. Lawyers rose with such animated regularity from their seats that they almost resembled pieces in a Whac-a-Mole game, prompting the judge to comment on their “chest-beating.”