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Blake Lively will receive about $400,000 in legal fees after the settlement of her legal battles with her This Is Us co-star Justin Baldoni.
This is well below the $8 million Lively sought to make up for her attorneys fees as she fought against the defamation lawsuit filed by Baldoni as part of their larger legal tussle. However, in the ruling Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Lewis J. Liman, wrote that he agreed with Baldoni and Wayfarer Studios, who said that Lively was “entitled only to the reasonable fees and costs necessary to defend against the defamation claim,” rather than her larger claim amount. This amounted to $363,000 in attorneys’ fees and $44,000 in court costs.
Lively had been seeking just over $8 million, which included $7.5 million in attorneys’ fees and another $540,000 in court costs. She sought compensation under a California law designed to protect survivors of sexual harassment and discrimination from retaliatory lawsuits.
While Liman found that the counsel’s rates were not unreasonable, in what he called a case with “complex legal issues,” he found that “the number of hours for which Lively seeks reimbursement is unreasonable.”
