It isn't over till it's over, says Seattle-based maverick trial lawyer Harish Bharti about a jury dropping charges against Boeing Company of discrimination against Indian Americans and other Asians workers.

Bharti lost his bid to hold Boeing responsible for discriminating against Indian Americans and other Asians in its hiring, salary, and firing practices. The lawyer known for taking on class action suits against corporate giants is filing an appeal within the next few weeks.

On June 2, a federal jury in the court of US District Court Judge Robert Lasnik decided the aircraft manufacturer had not discriminated against Asian Americans and other minority employees in terms of pay or job promotions.

The 1,850-member class of Boeing workers who brought the suit hail from India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and some East Asian countries. The class contained engineers employed at Boeing from October 1996 to the present and technical workers employed from October 1996 to March 2001.

Their lead lawyer, Bharti, who has in the past secured an apology as well as a $10 million settlement from hamburger giant McDonald's, told IANS that he would appeal the decision to the 9th District Court of Appeal.

"Since we started the lawsuit more than five years ago, we had our expert, Bernie Siskind, examine the data which included 750,000 documents in 400 boxes.

"He is nationally known, and he found disparity and he testified that there is a statistically significant disparity in wages," Bharti said.

"But the problem is that the moment I filed the lawsuit, Boeing started paying big raises to staff members and my clients. My clients got very excited and said they had never been paid such wages. In five years, with these big raises, by the time we were before the jury, some of my clients, including lot of Indians, were getting more than White employees. That, kind of, may have also helped Boeing too."

But Boeing has been quoted as saying its changes were part of overall changes in the company and not a reaction to the case.

Bharti said he was also concerned about the effects the 9/11 attacks would have on the case. "The primary client was from Pakistan and Afghanistan. My clients definitely shared that concern," he said.

"We are going to appeal because there are several appealable issues. Firstly, the judge did not let us bring before the jury, the disparity in retention ratings of my clients, so we couldn't argue that.

"It is very hard to prove a case when even though that was the primary reason clients came to us, we couldn't place that before a jury. We are also going to appeal on the wrongful jury instruction given by the judge," Bharti asserted.

The judge had instructed the jury to ignore Boeing's business practices unless they were intentionally discriminatory.

"My clients did not have a prayer based on the erroneous jury instruction telling jurors to ignore Boeing's conduct even if Boeing's compensation practices were unfair, incorrect or unwise," Bharti said in a statement.

He said: "To me it looks like deja vu here because in an earlier murder case that I fought, State v. Hendrickson, the judge Joanne Alumbaugh, gave an incorrect jury instruction which was repealed by the Appeals Court and very strongly criticised the judge. We will file an appeal within a month in this one as well," he said.

But Boeing's attorney Jeffrey Hollingsworth told local media that the verdict showed Boeing was a good place to work. He also contended the "Asian American" class Bharti used was erroneous, did not contain any Chinese, Japanese or Koreans, and at the same time, Middle-Easterners were clubbed together as "Asians."

Boeing is in the process of settling a gender-discrimination suit against it involving 28,000 women in Washington State.