For $2.7 million, Ellen Pao promised she wouldn’t appeal

Ellen Pao, right, gives a statement to reporters next to her attorney Therese Lawless at Civic Center Courthouse in San Francisco, Friday, March 27, 2015. A jury decided Friday that a prestigious venture capital firm did not discriminate or retaliate against Pao in a case that shined a light on gender imbalance and working conditions for women in Silicon Valley. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu) less Ellen Pao, right, gives a statement to reporters next to her attorney Therese Lawless at Civic Center Courthouse in San Francisco, Friday, March 27, 2015. A jury decided Friday that a prestigious venture ... more Photo: Jeff Chiu, Associated Press Photo: Jeff Chiu, Associated Press Image 1 of / 14 Caption Close For $2.7 million, Ellen Pao promised she wouldn’t appeal 1 / 14 Back to Gallery

After losing her high-stakes gender discrimination lawsuit and telling the world she just wanted to have her story heard, Ellen Pao offered to forgo her right to appeal if her former employer Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers paid her $2.7 million, according to court documents filed on Friday in San Francisco Superior Court.

Pao filed a notice of appeal on Monday, but only after making one last effort to settle the case, according to Friday’s filing by the venture capital firm.

The documents also defend its nearly $1 million in legal costs, which the firm offered to waive if Pao did not appeal. Pao’s team has called the amount, which primarily cover expert witness costs, exorbitant and excessive. In Friday’s filing, the firm said that Pao ran up Kleiner Perkins’ costs by forcing it “to respond to an onslaught of allegations and discovery over the course of three years leading up to trial and is now objecting when she receives the bill.”

In the filing, Kleiner Perkins said that Pao’s objections to the firm’s legal fees are “particularly nonsensical given her own post-trial demand ... for $2.7 million to cover her fees and costs.”

A six-man, six-woman jury found in favor of the venture capital firm in March after four weeks of closely watch testimony. At a time when tensions surrounding the tech industry’s lack of diversity were already boiling, Pao alleged that Kleiner Perkins promoted male partners over equally qualified women, and then retaliated against her for speaking up about it. Pao is now interim CEO of the message board site Reddit.

Pao’s Monday filing bought her legal team 40 days to elaborate on why she is appealing. During the trial, Judge Harold Kahn ruled in her favor on most motions, so it is likely that if she goes through with the appeal it will focus on motions that took place before the trial began.

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“Pao is obligated, as a matter of law, to repay a portion of our legal costs. We have offered to waive these costs as a good faith attempt to bring this matter to a close. In response, Pao demanded an additional $2.7 million payment ... in return for not appealing, despite the jury’s unequivocal verdict in our favor on all counts. We have no intention of accepting this unreasonable demand,” Kleiner Perkins spokeswoman Christina Lee said in a statement.

A spokeswoman for Pao declined to comment.

Documents filed ahead of a June 18 hearing over trial costs reveal that Kleiner Perkins also offered to settle the case before trial for nearly $1 million. Pao’s attorneys, however, said in a filing that the settlement offer was made in bad faith because her own legal fees had climbed to $650,000 before the trial started.

In Friday’s filing, the venture capital firm said that the $1 million pretrial settlement offer should have been more than enough, since at that point discovery was nearly complete, and it should have been apparent to Pao that there was a “strong likelihood” that she would not win.

Her $2.7 million settlement demand could have a lot to do with the four-week trial’s legal costs. Kleiner Perkins has long alleged that Pao, whose husband filed for bankruptcy, was financially motivated to pursue the lawsuit, though the judge repeatedly denied the firm’s attempts to introduce those allegations as evidence. A footnote in Friday’s filing argues that Pao should not be allowed to introduce evidence of any financial distress now to have the legal fees reduced, since it was not allowed in trial.

If Pao moves forward with the appeal, she will leave on the table $972,814.50 in legal fees Kleiner Perkins has offered to waive.

Kristen V. Brown is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: kbrown@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kristenvbrown