Stacy D. Phillips 

Stacy D. Phillips is a partner in the matrimonial and family law practice at Blank Rome LLP, where she draws on nearly 40 years of experience to represent high-profile and high-net-worth individuals in marital dissolutions and in the discreet protection of assets.

She said the work’s gotten more intense. “Post-COVID, you might have hoped the pandemic would make us kinder. But no, the divorce business now has made people less patient and nastier. Even the lawyers are that way now.”

Phillips sums up her role by using the phrase “dissoqueen” in her email address. In Blank Rome’s Love Bytes blog, she recently posted about the perils of ending a relationship with a narcissist. The names of her clients remain confidential.

“My client is a psychologist,” Phillips wrote, “and when I observed her soon-to-be ex manipulating, triangulating and gaslighting to the extreme in mediations, hearings and in repeated emails, she explained to me that that was the standard behavior of a typical narcissistic personality.”

“Divorcing such a person is an egregious insult to them. This can bring out the worst from the worst.” That’s a problem because the issue becomes how to manage that type of personality when planning how the couple — even though they have split up — will raise the child they had together.

“Psychology is a key to my trade,” Phillips said. “Some clients have told me I’m a better psychologist than their psychologist. I have to tell them, no, I’m not. And I’m more expensive.”

In a case that spanned a decade and partly settled last year, Phillips’ client was a wealthy Chinese national who separated from his wife in 2007 but chose to proceed very slowly. In 2018, he requested a trial. At the initial settlement conference, the parties were $1.5 billion apart on their valuations of the man’s company.

Decades-old tax issues involving hundreds of millions of dollars in exposure required Phillips to enlist Blank Rome’s international tax, white-collar criminal and Shanghai attorneys, plus forensic accountants.

Finally, she got creative. “We used a retired judge as a discovery mediator. Then we used him and another retired judge to hear mock closing arguments. That was really cool, and we managed to settle on terms that saved both sides at least a million dollars in attorney fees. We focused on what these folks really needed.”

In another case, a man retained Phillips to solve a problem: he’d paid his ex-wife’s bills informally for years — and now she demanded full spousal support and property divisions as if no payments had been made. The pandemic undercut the man’s income significantly. Phillips worked out a deal that, when the ex-wife died, satisfied her children.

Phillips moved to Blank Rome seven years ago. “Love my colleagues, love the firm,” she said.

— John Roemer