SAN FRANCISCO — The esteemed venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, its star partner, John Doerr, once said, “is a family, with occasional disputes.”

Maybe, if by “family” you mean one of those clans where everyone is fighting for power and wealth. In Superior Court here, the case of Ellen Pao v. Kleiner Perkins is beginning to look at little like “King Lear,” or at least “Keeping Up with the Kardashians.”

For two weeks a former Kleiner junior partner, Ellen Pao, presented her evidence that she suffered from gender discrimination. Along the way, she portrayed the firm as a place riven by sexism and unseemly striving, and that heedlessly employed and encouraged an unsavory cad whom she had the misfortune to briefly date.

Now Kleiner’s lawyers have for the first time the opportunity to defend the beleaguered firm in a sustained way, and on Tuesday and Wednesday they made the most of it. They depicted Ms. Pao, 45, as combative and full of resentment, the kind of co-worker who begrudges a colleague for tending to his dying mother.