Filings: Kleiner Perkins offers to waive nearly $1M in legal fees if Ellen Pao doesn't appeal, offered $965K settlement last year
Kleiner Perkins Is Seeking Nearly $1 Million in Legal Fees From Ellen Pao — Silicon Valley venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers filed legal …
Context & Ripple Effects
After the jury verdict went against Ellen Pao, the case moved from liability to cost allocation: Kleiner Perkins filed for nearly $1M in legal fees, while Pao's lawyers had already argued the case was not frivolous and moved to dismiss the $972K request. The firm's new filing reframes those fees as leverage — waived entirely if Pao forgoes an appeal.
The stakes on both sides are visible in the surrounding coverage: earlier in the trial the judge cleared Pao to seek punitive damages, so an appeal carried real downside risk for Kleiner Perkins beyond the fee bill itself.
First-order effects
- Pao now faces a binary choice — accept the fee waiver and drop the appeal, or fight on with nearly $1M in exposure plus the punitive-damages question reopened.
- Kleiner Perkins buys appellate certainty: waiving its own fee claim is cheaper than defending the verdict through months of further litigation.
Second-order effects
- The waiver turns into a bargaining chip in a price war over exit terms — Pao's side later counters by asking for $2.7M not to appeal, nearly triple the pre-trial settlement offer, showing each party pricing the other's litigation risk.
- When the dispute does reach the court, the judge cuts the award sharply — tentatively setting Pao's costs at $275,000, less than a third of what Kleiner Perkins sought — shrinking the firm's leverage in any future fee fights.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, post-verdict outcomes at prominent Silicon Valley firms get settled through negotiated fee waivers rather than appeals, with litigation-cost asymmetry functioning as the real deterrent to discrimination suits reaching trial.
- Judges trimming statutory fee awards below what prevailing defendants claim adds a check on that deterrent — the eventual outcome here saw Kleiner Perkins absorb the fees outright after Pao dropped the suit, honoring its earlier pledge.
The trend: High-profile Silicon Valley employment litigation is increasingly resolved through negotiated fee-waiver exits rather than appellate battles, making who pays whose legal bills the final battleground.