Sky Atlantic/HBO have recently started showing its very glossy new drama, War, about the divorce of a celebrity couple, billionaire social media mogul Morgan Henderson (played by Dominic West) and Hollywood actress, Carla Duval (played by Sienna Miller), and the machinations of their legal teams.
Is it any good? Well, that depends upon what you are looking for. If what you’re after is a glamorous depiction of an exciting world where lawyers are either highly principled crusaders for justice or duplicitous, scheming, venal and ultra-aggressive Rottweilers, then War is pretty entertaining. If what you are looking for is a realistic legal drama which bothers getting the law and legal practice right, then you’re out of luck.
As a solicitor, I am of course a professionally trained pedant and I can’t watch legal dramas without rolling my eyes so much I am at risk of fainting. So, partly out of a desire to keep you informed, but mostly due to a need to vent my frustration, I will now let you know where the makers of War get it badly wrong.
Episode 1 starts with Morgan, flush from winning an award for something, jumping into bed with a woman who is not his wife, but who it turns out is a friend of his wife. Carla has persuaded her friend to sleep with Morgan because she wants proof that he is a sort of husband who sleeps with women to whom he is not married. Her friend takes a post-coital selfie of herself and Morgan in bed together and, hey presto, Carla has her proof.
Quite why this is felt necessary is unclear. She meets her lawyers the next day who explain to her that the selfie has no evidential value. This is correct. Proof of adultery has no legal relevance at all. All divorces in England and Wakes now take place on a no-fault divorce. It has not been possible to cite adultery in divorce applications since April 2022. Even before that, adultery was of no relevance in relation to resolving financial issues. Conduct is only taken into account by the court in financial remedy proceedings where it would be inequitable for the court to disregard it. That has been the law since at least 1973. Mere adultery is not going to be regarded as relevant conduct. The fact that Morgan is the kind of chap who cannot keep his trousers on in the presence of an attractive younger woman is neither here nor there.
Carla’s lawyers initially seem quite professional, whereas Morgan’s lawyers are uniformly dastardly. (They all seem to call themselves lawyers in this production, rather than solicitors, which I assume is so that it does not confuse US audiences for whom a solicitor means a door to door salesman.)
However, Carla’s lawyers are now joined by Celia Imrie. I’m not quite sure who she is supposed to be. Carla’s lawyers have set up their own law firm so what role Imrie’s character plays is a mystery. Maybe she’s a barrister, but it’s not clear. Anyway, she seems slightly perturbed that Carla has engineered the sexual encounter between Morgan and her friend and then told her solicitors about it. She advises them to delete the email and selfie from their IT system and then to get Carla to send it again, so that they can deny knowing about it earlier. Quite why this is necessary is really not clear, but it is worth noting that deleting evidence and correspondence in this way is highly unprofessional and dishonest.
It is then revealed that one of Carla’s lawyers had acted for her when she entered into a pre-nup with Morgan before their marriage. Carla wants to “break” the pre-nup.
Using the same lawyer to do the pre-nup and to then challenge it is problematic in reality. If there are arguments in court about whether Carla is bound by the prenup, then the circumstances in which it was signed can be very relevant. Her lawyer is potentially a witness to this. A lot of pre-nups are signed uncomfortably close to the wedding day which can be grounds for the court to set it aside. If that is the case here, the lawyer might have to give evidence about what happened when it was signed. He may also have to give evidence about what advice he gave to Carla before she signed (albeit that it would probably be necessary for Carla to waive privilege so that the evidence can be produced). It may be inappropriate in real life for a lawyer who acted on the original prenup to then be involved in an attempt to get it overturned.
We now begin the meet Morgan’s legal team for the first time. Enter his lawyer, played by Pip Torrens.
Torrens seem to have cornered the market in scruple-free Machiavellian establishment types. You may recall him playing Sir Alan Lascelles, the Queen’s Private Secretary, in The Crown, where he brutally dispatches Group Captain Peter Townsend to a diplomatic posting to ensure that his affair with Princess Margaret is terminated. Keen to impress on Townsend that the plane is waiting to fly him to his new billet, Lascelles icily says “Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock”. Splendid stuff.
As Morgan’s lawyer, Torrens advises him that the prep-nup is bullet-proof and sets out the grounds for how pre-nups can be overturned, one of which is not providing full disclosure (albeit that he describes full disclosure as not failing to properly hide assets, which is very unprofessional).
There is a sub plot going on in the back ground about an ambitious young lawyer , Johnny Warren, (played by Archie Renaux) from the other side of the tracks who is struggling to find a job with a law firm. We know that he grew up the hard way because he punches an obnoxious Draco Malfoy type while working as a waiter. His career path is a little odd. After growing up in a rough part of London, he graduated from the University of Michigan and then worked as an intern in a New York law firm.
The problem is that his knowledge of New York divorce law may not be much use, given that the divorce is taking place in England. The writers are making the mistake here of thinking that lawyers are like scientists; science is the same the world over whereas the law varies hugely from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
Then the big twist happens. Turns out that Johnny is so desperate to get a job that he has agreed to be Morgan’s lawyers’ mole at Carla’s lawyers firm. Morgan explodes when he found out about this, but his lawyers persuade him that it is a good idea.
It is a terrible idea. In reality, the risk of getting caught is huge. If, and let’s face it, when they caught out, Morgan’s lawyers would inevitably all be struck off as well as probably facing criminal charges of perverting the course of justice, which would probably result in a sentence of imprisonment. Morgan would probably be banged up alongside them. It simply is not worth it.
Carla is keen to start the divorce application and wants to hand it to Morgan herself. Her lawyer correctly advises that that is not allowed.
The first episode ends with Morgan’s solicitors, correctly convinced that Carla is about to start a divorce application, instead ambushing her at a movie premiere by personally serving her with Morgan’s own divorce application on the red carpet. One of Pip Torrens’ flunkies hands Carla a manilla envelope containing a document that describes itself as a High Court divorce application.
In the real world, divorce applications take place in the Family Court, not the High Court. A financial remedy application, if sufficiently complex, can take place in the High Court and this might qualify, but the divorce definitely doesn’t.
The divorce application does not look remotely like the real thing. There is also no likelihood that the Family Court would have issued the application that quickly, apparently in the space of a few hours. All divorce applications are now made online nowadays and it usually takes the court a week or two to issue the application. Furthermore, while it is possible to personally serve a divorce application, there is no point in doing so unless the respondent has failed to acknowledge service. The court simply emails the respondent telling them that the applicant has started a divorce and that they need to download the application from the court portal.
Nor is there any benefit in being the party who starts the divorce first. It gives you no real advantage in relation to financial issues, save perhaps for the ability to control when the final order is made (which relates to pensions and is not likely to make a difference in a case where the couple are multi-millionaires, possibly billionaires).
War is very legally inaccurate, but to be fair, if it showed what practising family law is really like, it would make for very dull television. Inevitably the writer has employed a lot of artistic licence. Audiences love a hissable villain, and lawyers make great villains. It is the family lawyer’s lot in life to always be portrayed in dramas as greedy and divisive.
For all its flaws, War is, so far, better than The Split. When the BBC first broadcast The Split in 2018, they promoted it by saying that it was exactly how divorce lawyers were in real life. We were then treated to one legal inaccuracy after another. In the first ten minutes, one senior solicitor had responded to something that a husband had done by advising the wife to deny contact with their children (which is legally incorrect) and to delay the decree absolute, as of this was some kind of clever tactic, rather than normal practice in cases where there are pensions. It went downhill from there, and after three and a half episodes, I gave up. (My blog about The Split can be found here.)
Not that The Split’s legal flaws made much difference as far as audiences were concerned. There were three seasons and a two-part special, followed by a spin off.
If you want to see a non-lawyer’s view of whether War is accurate, William Cash’s article in The Spectator is worth a read (if you can get past the paywall). It’s an interesting view point, but I would add the following:
Cash says that the selfie evidence would is not admissible in court. I think it is more correct to say that whether it is admissible is not the point; the problem is not the circumstances in which the selfie was taken or whether Morgan was a victim of entrapment, the problem is that it is imply irrelevant.
He mentions that when he divorced 20 years ago, he would receive “Friday emails” from his wife’s lawyers at about 5.30 pm, which he regards as a dirty tactic. It’s not a tactic, but I accept that it is not the best way to practise family law. It is good practice to not send emails to your client or a litigant in person late on a Friday if they are likely to causes upset and conflict over the weekend.
The reality is that where an email like that is sent late on a Friday, it is due to a very busy solicitor trying to get work off their desk. It is not done deliberately to cause upset or to try and gain some kind of advantage. There is no advantage gained as a result, but solicitors should consider delaying this type of correspondence until Monday because it can cause upset, particularly when the recipient cannot get hold of his own lawyer until after the weekend.
Cash describes being served with divorce papers at home during Sunday lunch as another dirty ploy. But personal service is rare. It was equally rare in 2006. It is usually only done where the respondent has ignored the divorce papers sent to him by the court. If Cash had failed to acknowledge service of the divorce papers and had to be personally served, then I am afraid that I do not have much sympathy. It is not a solicitor’s “favourite ploy”; it is exasperating when our clients have to incur the cost of personal service and the associated delay. It is necessary because the respondent is not being sensible and is not doing what he or she is obliged to do.
Cash points out correctly that War is wrong when it says prenups are legally binding. The law on prenups was established by Radmacher v Granatino in 2010 when the Supreme Court decided that where the parties have freely entered into a pre-nup with a full appreciation of the implications, the court should uphold it unless it would not be fair to hold them to the agreement. The court can still decide to not uphold a pre-nup however, so they are not completely binding. That may change; the government is considering introducing Qualifying Nuptial Agreements, a more formalised and legally binding form of pre-nup.
Cash also says “It is also a myth that dividing assets under UK divorce law is complicated. It’s not. Assets are divided 50/50, especially when there’s not a messy custody battle with multiple children”. That is not correct. The starting point when dividing matrimonial assts is indeed 50/50, but that is the starting point, not the end result. The court can divert from equality if it needs to do so in order to achieve fairness and to meet the parties’ needs, and most importantly the needs of their children. It can be very complicated. One spouse may not be able to rehouse themselves and the children if they only receive 50% of the assets, especially if their income is lower and they don’t have as much mortgage capacity as their spouse. There may be assets which are non-matrimonial in nature and resulting arguments about if they should be ring-fenced from claims by their spouse .
Cash says that he found himself being followed 24 hours a day by a two man team of private detectivities. In 2006! That is astonishingly unusual. In over thirty years of specialising in family law, I have never needed to instruct a private detective. The days of gumshoes bursting into Brighton hotel rooms to snatch a photograph of an errant husband in bed with a lady of questionable virtue are long over. That sort of thing died out in the sixties when the divorce law was reformed to make it easier to divorce. A few years ago, a potential new client told me that she had instructed a private eye to follow her husband to see if he was being unfaithful. I explained to her that if she wanted to do that so that she could be certain that he was being unfaithful, then that was OK, but if what she wanted was proof of adultery so that she could divorce him, it was a waste of time and money. In those days when we still had fault-based divorce, we simply asked respondents to admit adultery, and if they were not prepared to, we issued a mildly phrased behaviour divorce petition instead, where no admission of fault was needed for it to progress.
Cash also claims that it costs £750 per hour to get divorced and that his first divorce costs him £90,000 in legal fees. All I will say about that is while solicitors can be expensive, not many of us could charge at £750 per hour. I certainly don’t. Most divorcing couples will not incur fees of that level, although you do hear of big money cases where those sorts of fees or far higher are incurred. But they are not the norm.
I have only watched the first episode of War so far, so who knows what will happen next. If this was a real case, I would tell Carla and Morgan to find new solicitors (especially in the case of Morgan). One of his lawyers says that if Carla’s lawyers play dirty then Morgan’s lawyers will be even dirtier, that they will be absolute filth. These lawyers should be avoided like the plague.
There has not been the slightest attempt to use alternatives to court, such as negotiation, mediation, collaborative law or arbitration. These alternatives to court are far better than litigating. The court now has the power to stay applications where it is not satisfied that the parties have made sufficient efforts to use non-court dispute resolution to resolve matters. Going to court should be the final option if negotiations (whether collaboratively or outside the collaborative process) is much better, as is mediation. If the parties cannot reach an agreement and need a legally binding decision from an independent third party in accordance with the law, they should jointly appoint a family arbitrator to decide matters for them instead. Unlike litigation, arbitration has the advantage of being private, something that celebrities should prefer, (unless they are the sort of dreadful celebrities for whom a bitter contested divorce financial remedy case is a good way to maintain their public profile).
The conflict inherent in litigation is best avoided wherever possible. In the words of Edwin Starr:
War, huh, yeahWhat is it good for?Absolutely nothing, uhm
War, huh, yeahWhat is it good for?Absolutely nothingSay it again, y’allWar, huh (good God)What is it good for?Absolutely nothing, listen to me, oh
17 October 2026
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