Lynne C. Hermle

With her devastating cross-examination skills, Hermle has become the go-to lawyer for tech industry’s messiest employment matters.

After soundly defeating Ellen Pao’s sex discrimination case against the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins in 2015, Hermle has been called upon repeatedly to defend against similar claims.

In 2016, she successfully represented Space Exploration Technologies Corp. in a case brought by a female welder who claimed she was the victim of sexual harassment.

Last year, in another case against SpaceX, she successfully defeated claims by a male technician that the company fired him for whistleblowing. Hermle successfully argued he was terminated for insubordination, poor performance, and bad behavior at work.

She is defending separate cases brought by in-house counsel against Apple Inc. and Farmers Insurance Group. For Apple, Hermle already won a significant pretrial victory when the court ruled that in-house counsel Lynn Levitan could not sue as a Jane Doe.

Hermle’s reputation for withering cross-examinations has become legend. In a recent magazine article Pao recounted the oft-told (and perhaps true) story about when Hermle’s intensity made an opponent throw up in court. Pao wrote that in her trial against Kleiner Perkins, Hermle “wasted no time in painting a picture of me as talentless, stupid, and greedy.”

For Hermle, intensity and relentlessness are necessary components of an effective defense for clients facing messy, and often deeply personal, employment litigation.

“I believe strongly in the cases I try and the clients for whom I try them, and I hope my conviction comes across clearly. I know I’m working to persuade a group of employees on those juries, and they come with their own experiences, some good some bad,” she said.

“I do my best to show them my clients’ good faith,” she said.

The defeat of Pao is sometimes portrayed as a setback for women’s equality in Silicon Valley. Hermle doesn’t see it that way. She proudly points out that her own Silicon Valley trial team is almost entirely comprised of women.

And they are “kick-ass” trial lawyers, she said.

— Andy Serbe