All’s fair in love and WAR!

For those of you who have been keeping up with my articles on the new TV series “WAR!” I have now watched Episode 4 and I am pleased to report it gets better, if more unrealistic and fanciful by the day!

Quick catch up: Sienna Miller is a glamorous film star divorcing her tech mogul hubby played by Dominic West in what is billed as a battle over a scandalous, high-stakes divorce “set against a backdrop of love, scandal, betrayal, and ambition”. (Wish my work life was that exciting!)

So far our warring duo have employed eye-wateringly expensive hot shot London lawyers to represent them. They have tried (I say “tried” because it all seemed a bit half hearted and doomed to failure) mediation. They then went to arbitration, all within a matter of days of Dom serving the Missus with divorce papers on the red carpet at her film premiere. The cad!

Arbitration having “failed” and skating over the fact that arbitration can’t “fail” (it is an alternative to court and once locked into the process the parties are bound by the arbitrator’s decision) they are now off to court. Oh and Celia Imrie keeps popping up as the barrister who obligingly issues court applications for the legal teams. (Just in case you are interested, barristers don’t do that; that is a solicitor’s job).

You can catch up on my reviews of Episodes 1 and 2 and Episode 3 if you’ve missed the drama so far.

Episode 4: Second thoughts and bigger demands

So. Episode 4.

Dom has clearly had second thoughts as he looks wistfully after Sienna with that am I doing the right thing look on his face.

Sienna however has other plans. She is now after half a billion. I may be wrong but I am sure that 2 episodes ago she only wanted £175 million. And her dare I say it, her rather incompetent legal team were about to settle for £45 million (without actually checking with her that that was ok with Sienna but hey, a minor detail). And all this don’t forget without any real exchange of financial information and no actual valuation of what Dom is worth.

Team Sienna prepares to play hard ball

Sienna’s legal team however is having a total wobbly. Personally I’d have sacked them by now. Especially as she seems to be their only client and her costs are all that’s keeping them afloat. Just.

However, having kicked her rather ineffectual husband and law partner into touch, the pregnant lawyer is on it so we now know that we are going to play hard ball!

Mareva injunctions and freezing orders

Dom’s super plan to transfer his shares to his financial advisor is about to come crashing down (you may recall from my last article that I told him this was a very bad idea).

Team Sienna decides to apply for a Mareva injunction firstly pronouncing it incorrectly (it’s Muh-ray-va not Mur-ee-va) and overlooking that we haven’t called it that for years (it’s now called a freezing order).

Legal intrigue and professional misconduct

And the episode ends with Sienna having a smooch with the lawyer employed by her husband’s legal team to infiltrate her legal team to feed his legal team info about what her legal team is up to (you are going to have to keep up with me here or this is going to get super confusing!)

By the way the Law Society and the Solicitors Regulation Authority really do not approve of this sort of stuff….the infiltrating not the smooching although they take a dim view of hanky panky with the clients as well ….and our young smoochee is likely to get struck off, prosecuted and fined at some point.

And Team Dom will probably get investigated and taken over by the SRA and all sorts of nasty things happen to them as well.

Roll on Episode 5!