A keyboard with a Google button. (Photo: Shutterstock.com)

Google is set to argue Friday that a case claiming the company discriminates against potential hires who hold conservative political views isn't suited for a class action.

Presiding Judge Brian C. Walsh of the Superior Court of Santa Clara County is scheduled to hear arguments Friday on Google's request for demurrer, which claims the facts don't support classwide relief. Google claims the perceived conservative political class of Google job applicants the suit is centered on does not constitute a “well-defined community of interest.” The tech giant, defended by Zach Hutton, a Paul Hastings partner in San Francisco, has asked the court to strike language in the complaint involving political class claims.

“Plaintiffs have not pled an ascertainable class,” the Paul Hastings legal team writes in support of demurrer. “Moreover, the Political Class Claims, on their face, are not suitable to class treatment because they rely on facts unique to each Google applicant, including the applicant's political identity and recorded engagement in political activity, the hiring manager(s)' knowledge of that activity, and the reasons behind the ultimate hiring decision as to that applicant.”

Former Google engineer James Damore brought the class action litigation against Google in January 2018 for allegedly discriminating against him and other conservative white males. Google fired Damore in 2017 for perpetuating gender stereotypes in a 10-page memo distributed to 40,000 co-workers. In the note, Damore accused Google of creating an “ideological echo chamber” that discriminates against people who oppose the dominant liberal ideology and claimed that the tech gender gap could also be caused not just by bias but biological differences, such as women's disposition toward “agreeableness” and “neuroticism.”

Damore and David Gudeman, another plaintiff in the case, withdrew from the lawsuit to pursue claims in individual arbitration late last year. The remaining class is made up of job seekers who say Google's hiring managers discriminated against them for their conservative viewpoints.

The Google applicants' legal team, led by Harmeet K. Dhillon, founding attorney for Dhillon Law Group Inc. in San Francisco, asked the court to overrule the company's demurrer on the basis that it is procedurally deficient. Civil procedure and California Rules of Court, the plaintiffs' team writes in its opposition to the demurrer, “require that each ground of demurrer be stated in a separate paragraph, clearly identifying what claims are at issue—not lumped together in a single, confusingly worded run-on sentence that renders it impossible for Plaintiffs to identify the legal basis for the demurrer, as is the case here.”

Additionally, the plaintiffs' lawyers claim the class was properly defined as “all … job applicants of Google who identified themselves as having conservative viewpoints through their words, actions, and/or conduct, who were discriminated against by Google due to their perceived conservative viewpoints and/or activities” as early as 2014.

Dhillon said she looks forward to getting across this hurdle. “All the major tech companies in Silicon Valley have been under attack for their human resources practices and political discrimination at various levels since this case began,” she said. “There is substantial case law in support for our position.”

Responding to the opposition to demurrer, Google's attorneys claim the job applicants fail to answer how the class members will be identified, forcing the court and the litigants to review millions of hiring records. The filing also claims that Dhillon Law Group has yet to define the parameters of conservative. “The term has no objective legal meaning, and instead begs a case-by-case analysis of the political views of every Google applicant over the past four years,” the company's defense team writes.

Hutton did not respond to request for comment at the time of publication.