Angelina Jolie’s lawyer now offers quickie divorces online
For a $750 starting fee, website takes couples through the process.
Since couples now NEW YORK — meet online, plan weddings online, cheat online and find couples therapists online, it is only logical that they should be able to divorce online.
It’s Over Easy is a new website that takes couples through divorce for a $750 starting fee. It is either liberating in its convenience or another sign of the pending apocalypse.
More curiously, it was founded not by some fly-by-night 1-800-SPLIT-NOW type, but by Laura Wasser, the affluent Beverly Hills-adjacent lawyer who has represented famous clients like Angelina Jolie, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera.
Wasser introduced the site privately to about a dozen of her friends and acquaintances in Los Angeles in the summer. Since late January, it has been available to the public in California and in New York, with plans to expand to Nevada, Oregon, Florida and Texas this year.
Wasser, 49, said her site was not designed for everyone.
If your spouse comes home every day and beats you, she said, “this isn’t for you.”
Instead, she said, it’s for people who think they can agree on how to divide what they’ve amassed together and who want control over the process. “Nobody knows our kids, our life, our finances, better than we do,” she said.
Wasser, who has practiced family law for 23 years and is a divorced mother herself, said she was inspired to create It’s Over Easy after writing her book “It Doesn’t Have to Be That Way: How to Divorce Without Destroying Your Family or Bankrupting Yourself ” (2013), which advocated less-expensive, less-contentious divorces.
She is not the first to think of this. LegalZoom has offered a divorce platform called Wevorce since 2012. But it lacks the star power of Wasser, who is frequently featured in tabloid magazines and in Vogue.
Despite this, Jake Stango, 39, the CEO of It’s Over Easy and a divorced father, said the site was meant to be amiable and inclusive. “In traditional divorces, there’s a fear that your partner has a better attorney than you do,” he said. “This is gender agnostic. It’s something for everyone to use. And we’ve taken out the sense of competition.”
It’s Over Easy offers four pricing tiers, starting with a free trial, during which users can answer questions needed to generate forms, but not download them — allowing the curious to fantasize online and complete net-worth statements after they have snits.
Wasser said the site amounted to virtual mediation. (Mediators, who typically charge far less than lawyers, have been making incursions into divorce resolution since at least the early 1980s.)
So far two divorces (both in California) have been completed, with others awaiting processing. The spring may bring a new wave of customers eager to be divorced by the end of the calendar year: Any payer of spousal support who completes a divorce after Dec. 31, 2018, will no longer be able to claim the support as a deductible expense.
Lest one think the site’s primary market will be millennials with no children or significant assets, on its first day 30 percent of users were 35 to 44, according to analytics provided by the company, and 22 percent were 45 to 54. A quarter were 25 to 34.