Wasser must have felt like the easy choice for Spears, according to media reports – the lawyer also represented the singer when she was battling for custody of the two sons she shares with ex-husband Kevin Federline.

So what else do we know about her?

Who’s Laura Wasser?

The 55-year old lawyer is managing partner at Los Angeles-based Wasser, Cooperman & Mandles who’s known for her cool head, empathy and wanting to make divorce less painful and pricey. “I want to normalise it a little,” she told The New Yorker. “It’s happening, and we need to make it better.”

Wasser contends that the only people who benefit from a divorce are the lawyers, stating, “I say to clients all the time, the more you argue, the more conflict there is, the more I get paid. I drive a Porsche. I’m wearing Alaia. I’m good. Let’s work this out and get you through this,” per The New Yorker.

In 2014, she published the book It Doesn’t Have to Be That Way: How to Divorce Without Destroying Your Family or Bankrupting Yourself. Four years later, she followed up with her online divorce service It’s Over Easy, which was subsequently acquired by Divorce.com, whose focus is to guide people through a low-conflict divorce. Wasser is the venture’s “chief of divorce evolution”.

The law runs in the family

The law is in Wasser’s DNA. Her father is Dennis Wasser, also a prominent divorce lawyer (and founder of the firm she now runs). She told E! News that she was conceived right after her father found out he had passed the California bar exam. They even named her Laura Allison Wasser – LAW. “I almost never had a choice as to whether or not I was going to be an attorney,” she quipped, “although I did fight it for many, many years.”

Her own parents divorced when she was 16, but she remembers it being a sublimely trauma-free experience. “They did it so gracefully and graciously,” she told Dame Magazine. “We still have lots of family occasions together.”

According to her interview with Dame Magazine, after Wasser passed the bar, she married a Spanish man in a beautiful, romantic wedding. Afterwards, she continued to focus on her career, firstly working at the Western Law Centre for disability rights, getting companies to put in safety rails in public bathrooms.

When her marriage to the Spaniard ended, she needed to get a proper paying job, so she decided to work for the family company. She never married again, although she does have two sons from two different former boyfriends, who she co-parents with.

Staying professional

Despite the high-profile nature of her job, she never comments on her clients’ cases and does what she can to stay away from the publicity that her celebrity divorce clients inevitably draw. The speculation over the Spears-Asghari break-up has just started, but will predictably escalate in the months to come.

Wasser, for her part, will stay mum on this and all her divorce cases, celebrity or not. As she said to the Los Angeles Times, “I don’t think it’s fair to make the worst time of somebody else’s life a kind of career booster.”