Former venture capitalist Ellen Pao must pay her former employer Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers $275,966 in court fees — far less than the nearly $1 million the firm sought after winning a high-profile gender discrimination case.

In a four-page explanation of his preliminary ruling released Wednesday, San Francisco Superior Court Judge Harold Kahn reduced the cost of four costly expert witnesses summoned by Kleiner Perkins because the court “must also consider the economic resources of the offeree” — the person alleging the discrimination.

Given that the venture capital firm has deeper pockets than Pao, the judge said it was more of a matter of “scaling” the cost of Kleiner Perkins’ experts.

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The firm sought $275,000 for the expert testimony of Harvard Professor Paul Gompers, but Kahn found that to be “be out of scale to the parties’ resources.”

The judge reduced that to $65,000, which “is in line with what I perceive to be an amount that Ms. Pao might have spent for an expert on the venture capital industry if she and her counsel chose to retain such an expert.” Kahn noted that Pao spent $65,221.58 “for the work of her human resources expert.”

“There is no doubt that KPCB has ‘vastly’ greater economic resources than Ms. Pao. Nor is there any doubt that Ms. Pao is not indigent,” Kahn wrote. “While both her current employment and the likely continuing remuneration in the form of carried interests from her former employment at KPCB show that Ms. Pao has significant economic resources, it is also undoubtedly true that the $864,680.25 that KPCB seeks in expert fees is a material amount in the context of Ms. Pao’s resources.”

In closing, the judge said “the parties are urged to check my math.”

In 2012, Pao sued Kleiner Perkins for $16 million in damages for gender discrimination and retaliation, plus unspecified punitive damages. She alleged that the venture capital firm promoted male partners over equally qualified women, including herself, and then retaliated against her for raising concerns about the firm’s gender dynamics by failing to promote her and ultimately firing her. Pao, now interim CEO of the message board site Reddit, was fired after seven years at the firm.

After she lost the case on all counts, the Silicon Valley firm offered to waive $972,814 in fees paid to expert witnesses and other costs if Pao did not appeal the verdict. Pao filed a notice to appeal on June 1. A hearing on the fees is scheduled for Thursday.

Joe Garofoli is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @joegarofoli