If you've been following the case, or even if you haven't, here's an update as they get ready to head to court.
The judge in a sex discrimination lawsuit that's riveted Silicon Valley ruled Monday that venerable venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers can't force a junior partner to take her complaint to binding arbitration. The tentative ruling, a win for Ellen Pao, is likely to boost the chances that the case will settle out of court for millions of dollars [...] Pao, who joined Kleiner Perkins in 2005 after stints at Tellme Networks and BEA Systems, alleged in her May lawsuit that she was pressured into sex by another junior partner who has since left the firm and that after she broke things off, he retaliated by excluding her from meetings and email discussions. Pao's suit claims that when she complained to the firm's top executives, she wasn't taken seriously. The suit says another Kleiner partner subsequently propositioned her and that the firm eventually retaliated by giving her a series of poor performance evaluations that hindered her earnings.
