Stacy D. Phillips

LOS ANGELES - When Blank Rome LLP wanted to establish a matrimonial practice at its Los Angeles office, it recruited Stacy D. Phillips and many of her colleagues in the firm she’d run for 26 years, Phillips Lerner ALC.

Phillips gained fame in part from her 2005 book “Divorce: It’s All About Control: How to Win the Emotional, Psychological and Legal Wars.” She won’t identify clients, but among those who are known to have retained her services are former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s wife; Britney Spears; Darryl Strawberry; and the former spouses of Whitney Houston, Axl Rose, Tori Spelling and Jean-Claude Van Damme.

Phillips moved to Blank Rome in 2016, where she remains a force in the field, as evidenced by her status as a nationally recognized family law practitioner who handles primarily high-net-worth and high-profile divorce cases. She underscores her prominence in her email address, part of which incorporates the phrase “dissoqueen.”

“We’re very melded,” she said of how smoothly she’s come to work with her new colleagues. “We all get along so seamlessly we don’t want to jinx it.”

Phillips sits on Blank Rome’s compensation committee, and she was headed to the Philadelphia office for a four-day session of setting the annual pay for the firm’s 359 partners. “We never fight about this, and we get it right more than 99% of the time,” she said.

That kind of comity seldom features in the marital breakups Phillips handles. With law partner Kristina C. Royce and others, she recently represented the husband, a Beijing business owner with significant wealth in private equity, in a complicated divorce.

“His wife and kids lived in Pasadena,” Phillips said. “The key issue was the date of separation.” The times each side claimed were 11 years apart. Because the husband earned much of his fortune after the date, the sums in contention were vastly different.

“He said his estate was at $40 million when they split and she said it was at $1.5 billion,” Phillips said. “That’s a huge spread.”

Plus, there were tax issues. “We worked with tax experts from our New York and Shanghai offices,” Phillips said. “We had some very sophisticated appraisers and forensic accountants.” The case took more than four years. “We had 10 or 12 mediations.”

With trial approaching, the parties retained two retired judges to hear mock closing arguments on the date of the separation issue. “That was a cool move. The judges evaluated what we did and helped us settle the case so that both sides ended up happy,” Phillips said.

- JOHN ROEMER