NEW YORK, Sept 26 — In her hour of need, Angelina Jolie Pitt turned to the hard-charging Los Angeles divorce lawyer known to TMZ readers and viewers as "the disso queen”, the word "disso” being short for dissolution of marriage.

"I guess you could say I am unorthodox,” said Laura Wasser, who, in addition to movie stars like Jolie Pitt and Johnny Depp, counsels an eclectic mix of athletes, musicians and reality-show stars, including a Kardashian or three.

Perhaps the earliest inkling that she had a knack for negotiating on behalf of another was when she was nine-years-old and marched into her parents’ living room, yellow legal pad and pencil in hand, and demanded that they give her younger brother an allowance.

She got her brother money, said her father, Dennis Wasser, himself a well-known divorce lawyer who has counselled celebrity clients. "And she took a percentage of it, too," he added.

Like her father before her, Wasser, a weekend surfer with a weekday penchant for sky-high stilettos, has become one of Hollywood’s most sought-after advisers. In recent days, she has been pulling out all the stops on behalf of Jolie Pitt, who on Monday filed for divorce from Brad Pitt, demanding sole physical custody of their six children.

Wasser’s name appears above that of her famous petitioner on the papers filed with Superior Court of California in Los Angeles County. The legal grounds given for the divorce are irreconcilable differences.

Wasser, 48, represented Depp in his messy split from actress Amber Heard. (Heard is giving her settlement to charity.) She has also counselled actress Jennifer Garner, who last year separated from Ben Affleck amid rumours that he had grown too close with the nanny.

Those cases follow a number of instances in which Wasser worked on behalf of high-profile women, including singer Gwen Stefani, who split last year from musician Gavin Rossdale, and Maria Shriver, who left actor and former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2011 after he admitted to an affair with a housekeeper with whom, it turned out, he secretly had a son.

For Wasser, the appetite for celebrity gossip has compounded the challenge of managing clients who value personal privacy but, at the same time, seek to influence interested onlookers.

"You won’t see her talking about her clients, because she will lose those clients,” said Jonathan Wolfe, part of the legal team that represented Katie Holmes in her divorce from Tom Cruise.

Wasser said she seeks to move "quickly and quietly”, preferring to settle her cases out of the spotlight.

Handling the sensitive matters that inevitably surface in such cases out of the media glare satisfies her image-conscious clients, she said, while also pleasing their managers, lawyers and talent agents, all of whom prefer that their clients not be so hamstrung by legal proceedings and online gossip that they have trouble reporting to a film set.

"Representatives value when their clients are working,” Wasser said. "That’s how they make their living, by getting their percentage.”

A long-time student of celebrity culture, Wasser was raised in Los Angeles and graduated from Beverly Hills High School in 1986. Others there at the time included Pauly Shore, David Schwimmer and Orange Is the New Black creator Jenji Kohan.

"She partied with the hot kids in high school,” her father said.

In 1994, she earned her law degree from Loyola Law School, and she put her J.D. to use as a disability-rights lawyer before joining her father’s firm, Wasser, Cooperman & Mandles. At the time, Wasser was newly divorced and vowed never to remarry. She has two sons by different fathers.

Brian Grazer, the Academy Award-winning producer of A Beautiful Mind, met Wasser in the mid-1990s. He had asked her father, who had represented Steven Spielberg and Clint Eastwood in their divorce cases, to serve as a consultant on Liar, Liar, a 1997 Jim Carrey comedy about a double-talking lawyer newly compelled to tell nothing but the truth. But when Grazer arrived on the set, Dennis Wasser was nowhere to be found.

"Instead, there was this super attractive girl,” he said. "She said, ‘I’m Dennis Wasser’s daughter’.” Grazer brushed her off at first. But as he got to know her, he found that "she was cool, smart and user-friendly,” he said. ("User-friendly” is Hollywood code for no drama.) In 2006, when Grazer was on the verge of a divorce from his third wife, novelist Gigi Lavengie Grazer, he turned to Wasser.

By then, she had made a name for herself. In 2001, along with famed lawyer Johnnie Cochran Jr, she represented singer Stevie Wonder after his former girlfriend claimed he gave her herpes. The case went to mediation. Two years later, Jolie Pitt hired her when she sought a divorce from Billy Bob Thornton.

Wasser said she met Jolie Pitt through David Weber, a business partner of Jolie Pitt’s entertainment lawyer, Robert Offer. Weber is also a former beau of Wasser and the father of one of her sons.

"Those guys are family,” Wasser said, referring to Weber and Offer. "They don’t want to deal with that icky, messy stuff. That’s because they are with their clients for life. For me, it’s six to 12 months.”

Offer is the lawyer who gave the press statement on Tuesday that set off an explosion of social media commentary and online traffic. "This decision was made for the health of the family,” Offer said. "She will not be commenting and asks that the family be given its privacy at this time.” The language was formal but barbed, with its suggestion that the "health of the family” was somehow imperilled.

After her initial foray with Jolie Pitt at the time of her split from Thornton, Wasser went on to help Britney Spears through the end of her marriage to backup dancer Kevin Federline; Robyn Moore at the time of her divorce from Mel Gibson; Ryan Reynolds, when his marriage to Scarlett Johansson was coming to an end; and Kim Kardashian, who was through with basketball player Kris Humphries.

Along the way, Wasser earned a reputation for hammering out settlements without going to trial. She said that she counsels celebrities to "go on lockdown” when their cases are drawing media attention.

"She is very direct,” said Sayre Victoria Ziskin, a friend and interior designer who decorated Wasser’s home and office. "She’s not wishy-washy. She knows what she wants and she goes for it.”

Wasser spends most weekends in Malibu with her two sons. She is on the advisory board for the Harriett Buhai Centre for Family Law, which supports victims of domestic violence. And she cops to being a clotheshorse, having been photographed most recently in Porter magazine in a salmon Oscar de la Renta dress and Christian Louboutin heels, her brunette tresses cascading over her shoulders.

She charges US$850 (RM3,510) an hour for her services and insisted that she eschews the role of therapist or after-hours drinking companion for her famous clients. "I cost too much,” she said. "I don’t believe they want to hang out with me. I have my own friends.”

She said she had not seen Jolie Pitt for years until they reconnected last week.

Still, she commands a certain loyalty. Of Grazer, she said, "I’m a good girlfriend to him.” In 2012, Wonder interviewed Wasser for Interview magazine, asking about her work, including how to handle the tabloid media. "I’ve definitely had cases where one side or the other is completely playing to the media and not really focusing on the matter at hand,” she told him.

Jolie Pitt is known for carefully crafting a public image. She and Pitt have successfully brokered the sale of personal photographs to publications like People and Time, with the proceeds going to charity. Jolie Pitt has also asked that magazines not refer to the couple as "Brangelina”. That is why some observers paused when the gossip website TMZ, founded by lawyer Harvey Levin, broke the divorce story Tuesday morning in a report that included Offer’s statement.

"What she is trying to do is frame the narrative,” lawyer Gloria Allred said of Jolie Pitt and her representatives. "When there is a vacuum of information, there is a lot of speculation.”

The tabloid press began churning out minute-to-minute stories, quoting unnamed sources claiming to know why the marriage fell apart.

While saying she prefers to do her job away from the spotlight, Wasser is certainly not media-shy. She has been profiled in Vanity Fair, Vogue, Elle and Bloomberg Businessweek. During an interview Thursday, she pitched a new app she is developing for people who want a do-it-yourself divorce.

Wasser is friendly with the gossip kingpin Levin, saying she met him when they spoke at a conference during which she argued that divorce documents should be sealed. (Levin did not agree.) The two have been photographed at numerous events, including at a party for Wasser’s 2013 book, It Doesn’t Have to Be That Way: How to Divorce Without Destroying Your Family or Bankrupting Yourself.

Levin, whose organisation has dominated the Jolie Pitt story thus far, declined to be interviewed for this article.

Asked if she was feeding the TMZ beast, Wasser said: "I do not talk to the press. Even Harvey. I’ll talk about me. I’ll talk about my clothes. But I don’t talk about my clients.” — The New York Times