Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck have enlisted the help of celebrity divorce attorney Laura Wasser to mediate the dissolution of their two-year marriage.
Can reveal the secrets behind Wasser’s sought after services, including her eye-popping hourly rate, thoughts on marriage and how she revolutionized the industry with an online divorce business.
For the Gone Girl actor, this isn’t the first time he’s leaned on the so-called “Disso Queen”. Wasser, 54, mediated his divorce from ex-wife Jennifer Garner in 2018.
While Benifer 2.0 are Wasser’s latest high-profile clients, the former couple join a long list of celebs who have worked with Wasser, including Johnny Depp in his divorce from Amber Heard, Britney Spears in her split from Kevin Federline, Kim Kardashian from Kanye West and Angelina Jolie when she parted ways with Brad Pitt.
In an interview with the New Yorker, Wasser disclosed her true feelings on the industry she’s dominated for decades and her thoughts on tying the knot.
Wasser founded It’s Over Easy, an online divorce service, in 2018. The website was bought out by Divorce.com earlier this year, naming the attorney its “chief of divorce evolution”.
She shared her goal in expanding the web service was to “normalize” the process of divorce, adding: “It’s happening, and we need to make it better.”
High-profile clients aside, Wasser had her own personal experience on the subject.
She was briefly married in her twenties and shares two sons with two former partners, though she was not married to either father.
When asked about the changes she’s witnessed in traditional American families while practicing law, she drew from her own personal experience as she spoke about a rise in blended families and decrease in marriages.
Wasser said: “I have two kids, with two different men. I wasn’t married to either one of them.
“I got married once— it was great. I was twenty-five. I looked great. I’ll never look better than I did at twenty-five at the Bel-Air Hotel.
“But I do think that the way people perceive marriage and family has changed, and, for my purposes, what I would love to have happen is to be able to effectuate that in terms of family law.”
The attorney also revealed she believes it’s become harder for people to accept the promise of “til death do us part“.
She explained: “I think people are less likely to let the state become involved in their relationship.
“We still have people who have the princess-bride wedding dream, but I also think people are much more willing to accept, O.K., this ended, we’re not dying at forty-five anymore, we’re dying at a hundred and something, and so it’s much harder to say, till death do us part.”
Wasser further noted the complications of getting divorced in the modern age, including high-priced attorney’s fees like the ones she charged.
As the “Disso Queen”, she hinted her rate was upwards of $1,000 per hour.
She noted: “There are two reasons why it’s so hard to get divorced. First is that we, divorce attorneys, make a ton of money by spouting all these code sections and ta-da-da-da-da. But the other reason is that the founding fathers didn’t want people to get divorced.
“It was sacrilegious, and if you were a divorced woman in society in the eighteen-hundreds you were pelted with rocks or whatever.
“But that’s not the case anymore, and if you look at the statistics, how can it still be so taboo? How can it still be so difficult to do? How do we still need to be hiring attorneys at a thousand dollars an hour?”
When asked if the mentioned rate was what she charged, Wasser quipped: “Uh-huh. I know. But I try to be really good.”
“But I say to clients all the time, the more you argue, the more conflict there is, the more I get paid.”
For couples like J Lo and Affleck, who reportedly did not have a prenuptial agreement and worked on several joint-projects during their union, that could mean a lot of hours of work for Wasser as the ex-couple divide their assets.
