A female office worker who sued Teamsters Local 150 for sexual harassment turned down an offer to settle the case before trial and came out of it Monday empty handed.

An 11-woman, one-man jury found that Lisa Beauchamp did experience "unwanted harassing conduct" at the hands of secretary-treasurer Jim Tobin because she is a woman. But it all happened before the March 3, 2008, statute of limitations deadline and Beauchamp is not entitled to a monetary award, the jury found.

The same panel failed to reach a verdict on whether Teamsters Local 150 was liable, and Sacramento Superior Court Judge Judy Holzer Hersher declared a mistrial on that portion of the case.

Beauchamp's attorney said he intends to retry the case.

Her lawsuit said that Tobin fostered a sexually charged workplace environment replete with office "party girls" who sat on the boss's lap and exchanged massages with him at workplace functions. It also scored him for inappropriate comments directed at Beauchamp and with making unwanted physical contact with her.

But the lawyer for Tobin and the local said the jury's finding on the union official doesn't really mean anything and that his client is completely exonerated in the case.

"There is a finding there was some harassing conduct, but they never reached the issue of whether it was severe or pervasive, or whether a reasonable person would have been offended," attorney John C. Provost said. "So none of those issues were really reached."

Provost declined to say how much money Tobin and the local offered Beauchamp to settle the case. But he did note that the offer was made under Section 998 of the California Code of Civil Procedure that requires the plaintiff to pay his attorney fees if the jury's award does not exceed the pre-trial offer.

"Suffice to say, they didn't do better than the 998 offer," Provost said.

Tobin said he was "happy about myself being cleared," even if it came on the statute-of-limitations technicality. It barred Beauchamp from recovering an award for actions that may have taken place before March 3, 2008, or roughly a year before the lawsuit was filed.

"None of that stuff happened," Tobin said of Beauchamp's allegations. "So I know the truth. So does everybody else involved."

Beauchamp declined to comment.

Her attorney, Mark P. Velez, said, "We're content we have an opportunity to retry the Local 150 case. We're going to retry that one."

Juror Amber Dean, a local customer-service representative, said there was no "precise" evidence to link the local to any wrongdoing. Nor was there any "substantial evidence" that Tobin harassed Beauchamp after the statutory deadline.

She said the photographs of Tobin cavorting with the "party girls" from the Local 150 office were enough to convince the jury that there once had been a hostile workplace, but too long ago for Beauchamp to collect.

After March 2008, "it was just her word against his," Dean said.

Velez said Beauchamp plans to return to work at the Sacramento office of the local, which represents more than 8,000 chauffeurs, UPS truck drivers, Campbell Soup workers, some state employees and other workers.

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