Q&A: Splitsville, USA Breaking up is hard to do, no matter who the players are.
By Raoul Felder

(FORTUNE Small Business) – If there's one man who understands the business of breakups, it's Raoul Felder. In 38 years as a divorce lawyer he has represented big names such as Robin Givens, Rudolph Giuliani, and the wives (you might not know their names) of Martin Scorsese and Patrick Ewing. He knows what can happen when two powerful personalities no longer want to operate as one. FSB senior writer Heather Chap-lin spoke with Felder. Here are some edited excerpts:

Not to be dense, but why does it get so ugly when people split?

It's like a blow to the solar plexus for most people. When you lose a divorce case--or even just file a divorce case--it feels like a life defeat. It's a defeat in the most personal voluntary exercise you can make in life. It tells the world you've had to reverse things in midlife, give up a lot of money.

Are divorces more difficult now than when you began practicing?

In many respects, yes. If you turn back the clock, all you had was a man paying alimony--$50 a week or something. Now, all these nebulous things are in the pot--fame may be in the pot, enhanced earnings, reputation. Now, you get involved with dividing up assets. Well, that's okay if it's 100 shares of IBM, but what if it's a business you're splitting?

Are breaking up a business partnership and going through a high-profile divorce similar?

You have no idea how right you are. The laws of divorce have been changed in the last couple of decades to say the dissolution of marriage is essentially the dissolution of a partnership--an economic partnership, among other aspects--and that's how it gets treated.

What are some things you've seen go really wrong?

Things have gone really wrong when one spouse murders the other. But there are other things too. I represented Robin Givens when she was divorcing Mike Tyson. The case was impossible to deal with because of the newspapers, which were calling Givens the Witch. We had to turn this around. (His reputation went into the pits when he was convicted of rape, but this was before that.) You can't pick up a phone and kill a story, but you can control a story by withholding certain information or taking certain steps.

Are there mistakes you see again and again that make a divorce go from just difficult to truly awful?

Well, emotion is a trap. People do very well in divorces if they can see it as a grand game. Move, countermove, thrust, counterthrust. Also, divorce is often a game of 'he who keeps the best records wins.' I have to train my clients how to keep diaries, records, times.

Are you suggesting people start doing that once they decide to get divorced, or from the very start of the marriage?

The institution of marriage today is a failure in America. Virtually one in two fail. Given this, an argument could be made that you ought to keep good diaries from Day One. Sure it's a little unromantic, but so is an ugly divorce.