Blake Lively vs. Justin Baldoni Legal Battle Will Likely Get 'Nastier' Before Anyone Settles: Expert (Exclusive)

Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni’s already-contentious legal battle will likely get uglier before they both eventually decide to settle their lawsuits, predicts legal expert Gregory Doll.

“It's very nasty, and I think it's going to get nastier,” Doll, a lawyer and partner at Doll Amir & Eley in Los Angeles, tells PEOPLE. He does not represent either party and is not involved in the case.

“It's going to be a very consuming, very difficult, very challenging time for the parties going ahead. I think they both got great lawyers, but they're going to pay a lot of money and it's going to be a lot of emotional turmoil,” he adds.

Doll points to the heated rhetoric in the back-and-forth between Lively and Baldoni’s camps since the actress, 37, took legal action against her It Ends With Us costar and director, 41, claiming he sexually harassed her on the set of the 2024 movie and launched a retaliatory public smear campaign to "destroy" her reputation after she spoke up. Two of Baldoni’s associates at his production company, Wayfarer, were also named as well as publicists representing him.

Baldoni then filed his own $400 million lawsuit against Lively, her husband Ryan Reynolds and their publicist, arguing that Lively was the one to smear him and that she plotted to take control of the film and its promotion. He accused them of extortion and defamation. (He also filed a separate $250 million lawsuit against The New York Times, which published Lively initial allegations in a Dec. 21 article.)

The judge overseeing the Lively vs. Baldoni lawsuits, Lewis Liman of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, has ordered a pre-trial conference for Feb. 12, where Doll says they will hammer out details.

“They talk about what is the likely expectation for a trial date estimate? How long do we need to have discovery? How many witnesses are going to be deposed? What kind of documents are you going to be seeking from one another? When should we set a trial, and for how long should we estimate that trial will last? Is it going to be a one-week trial, a two-week trial, a four-week trial?” says Doll.

After the hearing, Judge Liman will then issue a scheduling order, laying out dates for completing the discovery process and submitting summary motions.

Doll predicts both sides will want to move forward with the discovery process and deposing potential witnesses.

“Now that they're at this critical point in the case where they've laid these very detailed complaints out against each other with all these very serious allegations, I think they're going to want to find out everything that happened that they didn't know about,” he says.

“One of the things that you see in these cases so often is that once the parties start to see what was happening behind the scenes they didn't know about, the emotion gets higher, they get more angry, and it gives it more chance to propel forward,” continues Doll.

But he predicts both parties will want to settle after the discovery process and prior to a trial, and notes a study that found around 92 percent of all civil cases settle. “Could this be within the 8 percent? It's possible,” he continues. “Statistically, it's not likely.”

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