Laura Wasser graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in Rhetoric. She is one of the highest-profile divorce lawyers in the country. She has represented some of the biggest celebrities of the past generation: Britney Spears during her split with Kevin Federline, Angelina Jolie during her divorce from Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp during his divorce from Amber Heard, and Kim Kardashian during her divorce from Kanye West, among them. The gossip Web site TMZ has dubbed her “the disso queen” for her facility in dissolving the unions of the rich and famous, and she is often featured on that site and on others like it, in conjunction with the relationship travails of her clients. As managing partner at her firm—which was established by her father, Dennis Wasser, also a divorce lawyer—she is currently overseeing about a hundred cases. Wasser, Cooperman & Mandles’ offices were featured in Noah Baumbach’s 2019 divorce drama, “Marriage Story,” and Wasser was reportedly an inspiration for Laura Dern’s character in the movie, a kittenish attorney with a killer instinct.
In 2018, Wasser founded It’s Over Easy, an online divorce service. Earlier this year the venture was bought by Divorce.com, which has also named Wasser its “chief of divorce evolution.” Whether in her dealings with her celebrity clients, or in her role facilitating digital divorces for the common man, she’s concerned, she told me, with “the evolution of dissolution,” or how to make divorce, if not completely painless, then a bit less painful for all parties involved. “I want to normalize it a little,” she said. “It’s happening, and we need to make it better.” Wasser herself was married only once, briefly, in her twenties. She now has two sons, aged seventeen and twelve, whom she shares with two ex-partners, neither of whom she was married to, though she has warm relationships with both of them. “We’re a family,” she told me. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity. (quoted from a 2022 New Yorker interview)