A US judge has awarded Blake Lively about $407,000 in legal fees and costs in her settled dispute with Justin Baldoni, far below the nearly $8 million she had sought. Her lawyers nevertheless described the outcome as a significant accountability measure, saying Baldoni’s $400 million lawsuit had been dismissed as retaliatory and intended to suppress criticism.

Judge Lewis Liman awarded $363,245.40 in fees and $44,206.35 in costs, finding many of Lively’s claimed hours unreasonable and excluding work on media relations as unnecessary to defending the defamation claim. Lively’s lawyers also pointed to Rebel Wilson’s separate dispute over The Deb, where filings allege involvement by some of the same crisis-PR and legal figures in online attacks; those claims remain unresolved.