U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken on Friday ruled that the state of Oregon has to pay more than $10.8 million in legal costs for the lawyers who sued the state on behalf of foster children.

That, combined with additional costs and the $22.85 million the state spent on its own lawyers, takes the taxpayers’ bill for the five-year lawsuit to more than $34 million.

Advocacy groups A Better Childhood and Disability Rights Oregon filed the lawsuit in 2019 against the state Department of Human Services on behalf of foster children who said they had been neglected on the state’s watch. Throughout the legal battle, the groups accused the state of knowingly underfunding the system and failing to provide adequate support for vulnerable children.

The plaintiffs included a 17-year-old Native American boy whom lawyers said had lived in at least 50 different foster placements and was about to age out of the foster system without a secure place to live. Another plaintiff was a 9-year-old girl whom lawyers said was sent to a program in Montana where she was drugged and physically restrained by up to four staff members at a time.

The extensive legal fight ended with a settlement earlier this year in which the state agreed to strengthen protections for foster children and hire an independent expert to address ongoing systemic shortfalls.

The May settlement said both sides would try to negotiate the fees owed to plaintiffs’ lawyers, but when the parties couldn’t agree on how to handle those costs, the court decided, Aiken’s Friday ruling said.

Aiken ruled on Friday that in addition to paying for nearly 23,000 hours of opposing lawyers’ work, the state must pay an additional $600,000 for their travel and expert witnesses. Aiken’s award covers almost all of the plaintiffs’ legal costs, said Disability Rights Oregon spokesperson Melissa Roy-Hart.

Advocates cheered the decision.

“Honorable Judge Aiken’s decision to award nearly all attorney fees and costs reflects the substantial work required to fight for five years on behalf of thousands of children and young adults in Oregon’s foster care system,” Emily Cooper, Disability Rights Oregon legal director, said in a statement.

Representatives for Oregon’s Department of Human Services and Department of Justice did not reply on Monday afternoon to requests for comment on the ruling.

The state fought the bill from the children’s attorneys “in strident terms,” Aiken’s ruling says, and urged the judge to cut that payout in half.

But Aiken wrote that the state’s objections “ring hollow” in comparison to the state’s own spending on the case. The majority of what the state spent to defend itself against the class-action lawsuit went to the prominent Portland law firm Markowitz Herbold PC.

Roy Kaufmann, communications director for the Oregon Department of Justice, defended the state’s spending to The Oregonian earlier this month and said that the complex demands of the class action suit meant that experienced lawyers had to spend “a great deal of effort” and time to reach a settlement.

Aiken pointed out that the case was repeatedly referred to settlement as early as 2019, though lawyers couldn’t come to an agreement to end the lawsuit until the eve of trial this year.

“It is impossible not to reflect on how much attorney time and public money might have been saved,” Aiken wrote, “had the parties been able to come to an agreement earlier.”