I charge the A-list thousands, but divorce can be cheap and easy
She’s fought for everyone from Angelina Jolie to Kim Kardashian and helped inspire Oscar-nominated Marriage Story. Now Hollywood’s top divorce lawyer is bringing her expertise to the UK
January isn’t called ‘divorce month’ for nothing. It’s the time of year when warring couples, following a stressful Christmas, are most likely to call time on their marriage.
unfortunately, it’s also the time of year that people are strapped for cash.
While so-called ‘one click’ online divorces have been available in the uK for a while, it’s hard to know who’ll get you the best deal from among the dozens of options out there. So news that Hollywood’s top divorce lawyer, Laura Wasser, is joining the online fray — with a mission to help the non-rich end their marriages quickly, cheaply and painlessly — could be music to some people’s ears.
Laura is the lawyer many celebrities turn to when they’re facing an unhappy- ever-after. She’s negotiated divorces for stars including angelina Jolie, when the actress dissolved her marriage to Billy Bob Thornton (and oversaw the initial legal stages of Jolie’s ongoing divorce from Brad Pitt); Johnny Depp (splitting from amber Heard); Kim Kardashian ( from Kris Humphries); and Maria Shriver (from arnold Schwarzenegger).
She has acted as mediator between Jennifer Garner and Ben affleck, and between Lauren Sanchez ( the girlfriend of amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos) and her husband Patrick Whitesell, when both couples had outstanding issues to settle.
It was Laura upon whom director and writer noah Baumbach reportedly — and loosely — based the divorce lawyer character played by Laura Dern in hit film Marriage Story. (Wasser has said she doesn’t recognise herself in the spiky portrayal, but has congratulated Dern on her Oscar nomination.)
Connections run deep: in Baumbach’s own divorce, Laura acted for his ex-wife, Jennifer Jason Leigh; and she represented Dern in the actress’s divorce from former husband Ben Harper. Baumbach even persuaded Wasser to loan her office building for the legal scenes in Marriage Story.
‘When it comes to divorce, celebrities are just like us,’ says Laura. ‘They’re terrified, sad and angry. They care about how their kids are going to be.’
We are chatting in her office in Beverly Hills, Los angeles, where she is a partner at the law firm started by her father, Dennis Wasser, in 1976. His clients have included Tom Cruise, Mia Farrow, Steven Spielberg and Jennifer Lopez.
Petite, with long, glossy hair and a wide smile, Laura, a 51-year- old mother of two, is wearing a blue leopard-print Paul Smith shirt-dress and Valentino boots. She charges $950 (£725) an hour for her legal services and requires a $ 25,000 (£ 19,000) retainer, a fee paid in advance.
WARM and friendly, she shows me into her inner sanctum — not the typical wood-panelled workplace you would expect a powerful lawyer to have, it’s modern and uncluttered with eyecatching art on the walls. There’s a huge framed photo of a couple in bed, for example, with a woman’s red- soled Louboutin sticking out from under the rumpled bedclothes alongside a man’s bare feet.
‘It’s not me, but it kind of reminds me of the end of the day,’ laughs Laura, who has a longterm screenwriter boyfriend.
There’s also a painting that proclaims, ominously or optimistically depending on your point of view, the words ‘ The End’ above a sofa. I spot a box of Kleenex sitting on a side table. If only walls could talk.
Is this where Maria Shriver sobbed about the discovery of arnold Schwarzenegger’s love- child with their maid and decided it was time to terminate The Terminator? Was it here that angelina launched the first salvo in her acrimonious divorce from the two-time Sexiest Man alive, Brad Pitt? ‘I never, ever talk about my clients,’ says Laura, her easy charm momentarily dissolving into steeliness.
Instead, we are here to talk about her website its over easy.
com, which, she claims, allows couples who cannot afford huge legal fees to divorce cheaply and easily.
‘People date online and they bank online, so why can’t they divorce online?’ she reasons. ‘It’s for couples who want to separate amicably, save money and keep control of the process.’
CHANGES in the law expected this year will make divorce in the uK far less painful. The Divorce, Dissolution and Separation Bill is going through Parliament and, if passed, will enable no- fault divorces, allowing couples to split without one party officially taking the blame (for reasons of adultery, for example).
The introduction of no-fault divorce chimes with Laura’s view that couples now want kinder, gentler ends to a marriage rather than a bitter, dragged-out War of The roses-type split.
‘Look at the way celebrities are divorcing,’ she says. ‘There’s “conscious uncoupling” — all kinds of names for it.
‘The fact is, the public looks at celebrities and wants to emulate how they do things in almost every facet of life. So, if we’re looking at the Jennifers and the Bens or the Gwyneths and the Chrises, and they’re divorcing with care and concern for each other, people think: “Maybe we should do it that way, too.” ’
But surely marriage is something you should stick at?
‘absolutely,’ says Laura. ‘People should try to save their relationships. I think marriage is lovely. I think monogamy is lovely. I think co-habitation and co-parenting are lovely. But we have to have the fluidity to change things if they’re not working.’
It is not easy to decide when it is time to cut your losses, she admits. ‘ It’s when the bad outweighs the good. But relationships are so fluid — you can decide you can’t stand him, and then he suddenly does something wonderful. Or something happens to a family member and he’s not there. and it’s at that point you make the break.
‘I’ve had people come to me year after year, saying: “I don’t know if I’m ready.” I get it. you have to be ready because it’s going to be gruelling to make that transition.
‘We want the legal part to be easier. We want the financial part
to be easier, but emotionally, you’re going to go through some bad to get to the good.’
She advises clients who are unsure whether to end their marriages to try couples counselling first. If that doesn’t work and divorce is the only option, she recommends building a support system to get you through it.
‘Find someone who’s not friends or family. There are people at church or divorce support groups where you can vomit up everything you have to say.
‘You can also, believe it or not, use your soon- to- be- ex as a support system. You can say: “We got into this together, let’s see if we can get out of this together.”
‘If you have kids, you’re going to deal with that other person for the rest of your lives so it’s in everybody’s interests to keep conflict to a minimum.’
A change she has seen in her 25 years of family law is that women are demanding more than they have done in the past: fair and equitable settlements.
‘I’m also seeing more women not abrogating their financial knowledge,’ she says.
‘If you made an arrangement at the beginning of your marriage that you were going to be the child-rearer, that you were going to stay at home — fine. But you have to understand what’s going into the household each month and what’s going out. Women can’t ask for a fair settlement if they don’t know what they have.
‘Also, establish your own credit. I have women who can get a table at any restaurant in Los Angeles, New York or London. They sit in the front row of the Paris and New York fashion shows, and yet they come in here and say: “I don’t have my own credit card. It’s got my name on it, but it’s his account.” When they go to buy a house post- divorce, they’ve got no credit.’
We may imagine celebrities are cushioned against the pain of divorce by fame and wealth, but it is not so, the lawyer claims.
‘ They all have the same insecurities — maybe even more — that we have about dating again,’ says Laura. ‘ And they’re concerned about money. It’s all relative: you might be wondering if you’re going to have to live in your car, while they’re asking themselves: “Am I still going to be able to fly private?”
‘I tell my clients: “If you guys have horrible things to say about each other, say it to your mothers, say it to your friends. Don’t say it to the media and don’t put it in the court papers because they’re filed in the public system.” ’
In her decades overseeing divorces, not much surprises Laura. Not naming names, she tells me about the angry wife who steamed the labels off her ex’s valuable wine collection so that it was worthless. He and his friends drank it anyway.
Then there was the rock star and his ex who turned up late for a court hearing. It turned out they had been having break-up sex in the back of his Rolls-Royce.
Laura was married briefly, at the age of 25, and divorced a year later. The couple had no children.
She now has two sons, aged ten and 14, by two dads and they co-parent amicably, she says.
Is she friends with her famous clients? ‘I don’t want them to feel I’m not their friend, but I’m not their friend. I’m charging them for my time,’ she explains.
‘I will share with them, to the extent that it seems like it might be helpful to them, my personal experience as someone who’s been in relationships and out of them. But it’s a professional relationship.’
Sometimes, she says, she sees former clients a year or so after their divorces in restaurants and they avoid catching her eye.
‘I remind them of a painful time in their lives, and even if they say I helped them through it better than anyone else could, they don’t want to be hanging out too much with me afterwards.’
FOR now, Laura’s divorce packages on its over easy.
com are available only in the U.S. and Canada, where packages start at $750 (£575) per spouse. But she intends to launch in the UK soon.
Users register on the divorce platform and invite their spouse to join. You provide the basic information to start the divorce, which is filed to the court on your behalf, and your spouse is served with the initial divorce documents.
After that, the site helps both of you resolve issues of child custody, support and divisions of assets before the settlement terms are put into an enforceable judgment and filed to the court.
Brits contemplating divorce can benefit from access to the free content and resources provided by top experts who are on the website, such as advice on parenting an anxious child through divorce and how to draw up a shared plan for co-parenting expenses.
They can also listen to Laura’s podcast, Divorce Sucks!, and will be able to subscribe to the video series next chapter series. com when it launches shortly, advising how to make peace with your past and launch the next chapter of your life.
Laura says she is not cynical about marriage, but has no plans to tie the knot again herself.
‘If you’ve found your soulmate, till death do you part, then that’s one of the luckiest things. But it doesn’t happen to everyone and I don’t know if all humans are meant to mate for life,’ she says.
‘I just know from experience and from the statistics that people are better off — and kids are better off — with two not-married parents who are happy, than married parents who are miserable.’