Hollywood Ever After: Laura Wasser, Divorce Attorney to the Stars
by Mary Waldron
Laura Wasser in 2007
Wasser had a typical Southern California upbringing, and no one in her high-school graduating class would have guessed that the privileged party girl and travel junkie from Los Angeles they knew would go on to defend Britney Spears against K-Fed. With Wasser running the show, it's no wonder K-Fed starred in the popular 2007 Super Bowl ad for Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company, supporting the company's slogan: "Life comes at you fast."
After fighting the tradition for as long as she could, Wasser finally began to cave in to the pull of law during the latter half of her undergraduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, in the early 1990s. "Even in my early years of college, I had no intention of becoming a lawyer because, of course, I didn't want to do what my parents thought I'd be perfect at doing," she said. But after studying rhetoric, the art or technique of persuasion through the use of oral or written language, Wasser was sold on the legal field.
During the summer of 1994, after her graduation from Loyola Law School, Wasser began working at the Western Law Center for Disability Rights while studying for the California bar exam. Aiming to raise the stakes a bit higher, Wasser began clerking for her father's Los Angeles family law firm, Wasser, Cooperman & Carter. Yes, the "Wasser" in the firm's name refers to her father. Having proven herself on the fast track, Wasser is now a partner and has unexpectedly built a strong reputation as an attorney handling celebrity divorces.
Although she claims she never set out to focus on family law or celebrity divorce cases, Wasser has found that these areas of law tend to hold her interest. "You get to learn a little bit of everything. From representing producers to people buying homes, you're constantly stepping into other people's lives," she explained.
Do not let the glitz and paparazzi fool you; celebrity divorces are not always as fun as they seem.
"Sometimes it's much more difficult to represent celebrities because their cases are often played out through the media, and it's difficult to keep it in perspective with the larger-than-life personalities," she said.
Wasser has seen it all—the good, the bad, and definitely the ugly. "The ugliest cases are the custody cases," she said. "My job is to keep it a business transaction." One of the worst cases she has dealt with involved an incident in which the wife sent her husband to their guest house to cool off after a fight. Once he was in the house, which had a concrete stairway leading up to the door, she called his cell phone and apologized, asking him to come out and talk things over. Little did he know that his soon-to-be-ex-wife had placed tacks all along the stairs for him to step on while barefooted. Naturally, after falling down the stairs in pain, he began screaming and yelling like a maniac—just in time for the police, whom his wife had called, to arrive and cause a scene.
Although Wasser has seen her share of ugliness, for the most part, the celebrities she works with just want smooth and amicable divorces.
Once upon a time: Britney Spears and K-Fed after the Grammy Awards in 2006, shortly before rumors of divorce began surfacing
"If you can get two people through their divorce without having to spend an inordinate amount of money on your fees and with them each having an equitable amount of time with their children and both of them being able to continue with the type of lifestyle that they became accustomed to in the marriage, that's a win," she said.
Still in her 30s, Wasser can relate to much of her young—and young-at-heart—clientele, which has given her a major edge on her older, more traditional competition, most of whom are men over 55. Wasser speculates that a lot of her younger musician and actor clients find it easier to relate to her, saying, "I don't think there are a lot of lawyers at my level at my age. It's especially apparent with those clients with children. I have a son who's 20 months old. Usually, they didn't sleep last night; I didn't sleep last night. I think that's something that makes me more palatable," she said. "When I talk to 25-year-old musicians or young actors and actresses, I talk the way I talked when I was in high school, and they understand me."
Now that she is at a high point in her career, Wasser is really able to choose whom she wants to represent. This "straight shooter" likes to take cases that she knows are plausible and fair. Hoping to eliminate the long, drawn-out divorce cliché, she always tells her clients the same thing: "The longer that the case goes on and all the craziness continues, the more I get paid."
Despite her delicate and friendly demeanor, many people have described Wasser as "one tough cookie" in the courtroom. Justice magazine's Alex Koppelman commented, "She has a reputation as a bulldog; that's what everybody says about her. She is known for being very tough in the courtroom, and you know if someone has hired her it will be a hard-fought battle."
Wasser laughed when she referenced comments on her "tough" courtroom style, saying, "I don't see it, and most of my colleagues laugh about it because I'm not a big person, and I'm usually extremely nice, and I'm fairly soft-spoken."
These Newlyweds lasted less than four years before calling Wasser-Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson at the MTV Video Music Awards in 2005
Despite the rumors, Wasser's wise philosophy on attorney conduct is "You get more with honey than you do with lemons." Though many lawyers pride themselves on their hardened, no-nonsense images, Wasser knows that she will be dealing with her fellow divorce attorneys time and time again. "You want to make sure that the people that you come up against in court again and again respect you and enjoy working with you instead of always going for the jugular," she said.
Wasser cannot emphasize enough how important it is for young lawyers to soak up as much legal experience as soon as possible in their careers. "It's very difficult to get in the door in family law or entertainment law because it's so specialized. Clerk or volunteer for a nonprofit organization to get experience," she said. By the time law students are 3Ls, they usually have grasped the material and can become bored. This is the time to "try to get some experience," Wasser advises. Explaining the need to jump right into law, she went on, "Law school is like spending three years reading about how to drive a car, and many law graduates finally get in the car after graduation and say, 'What do I do?'"
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