Madonna, Guy and the grande dame of divorce

This was a divorce that should have taken them to hell and back. When Madonna, the highly strung pop star with a £300 million fortune, announced in the summer she was splitting from Guy Ritchie, the British film director who has barely had a hit since marrying her, it seemed that another celebrity divorce played out in gruesome detail in public.

But just a few months on, Madonna and Ritchie are on the verge of tying up all the loose ends of their "quickie" divorce. She has given him a settlement of about £45 million in cash and property and the thorny issue of care and residency of the children is all but resolved. "Everything is going swimmingly," a source close to the pop star tells the Evening Standard, "I don't think there's a battle. It's amicable. Everything is going to be resolved in the next couple of weeks."

For this Ritchie can in large measure thank his lawyer Helen Ward, one of the grandes dames of the divorce courts who is respected and feared in equal measure. Friends say she is tenacious and "utterly discreet" while her detractors - and she appears to have a few - accuse the 56-year-old of being aggressive, even a bully.

A workaholic, with a reputation for sending fierce legal letters at three in the morning, Lady Ward has carved out perhaps the most lucrative divorce practice in the world, with a celebrity client list coveted by her rivals. It is an impressive feat for a lawyer whose first words of advice to prospective clients are: "Why do you want to spend all this money getting divorced?"

Incidentally, her title comes through marriage to the Court of Appeal judge Lord Justice Ward, who divorced his first wife in 1982 before marrying Lady Ward a year later.

She is now poised to earn record fees. Her latest client is Bernie Ecclestone, the Formula One grandee, who appointed her last week after dispensing with his previous lawyer. Her task will be to claw back as much as possible of £2 billion that Ecclestone put in an offshore trust in the name of his wife Slavica for tax reasons. The settlement, when it finally comes (sources suggest the case will drag on for at least a year) is expected to be the biggest in history, earning Lady Ward, who charges £500 an hour, huge fees. One rival lawyer suggested she could make as much as £2 million this year alone.

Two years ago, she secured a £48 million payout - the highest award ever made by a British court - for Beverly Charman in her divorce from John Charman, an insurance magnate. Rumours abound that in the end he did not pay the full amount - only £35 million.

Other clients include Lord Lloyd-Webber, Paloma Picasso, Ian McEwan, Countess Spencer and David Seaman, the former England and Arsenal goalkeeper. Of Seaman, Lady Ward, who prefers the arts to football, once said: "So what does he do?" There will be other famous names who will have been kept out of the newspapers entirely. She will often visit clients at their home or at a neutral venue rather than risk them being spotted at her law firm, Manches, in Aldwych.

She declined to speak to the Evening Standard this week. Indeed, interviews are rarely if ever given. One reason for her reticence is the loss of her daughter Amelia, who was killed on a Duke of Edinburgh award scheme trip to South Africa in 2001. She was hit on the head by a rock as she stood at the foot of a cliff. Her twin sister Kate was also on the trip. Amelia was just 16 and, almost eight years on, the memories are still painful. A small and simple memorial stone in Gray's Inn Square is inscribed with the words: "Amelia. She lived in this square and lit it with radiant beauty. A short yet perfect life."

"The loss of her own daughter makes her even more sensitive," says one close friend and colleague who declined to be named. "The main thing about Helen is she is utterly discreet and never seeks publicity. It is not chance she has the two biggest cases in town. She is completely committed to her clients in a way that they utterly trust her. And because they trust her so much she can lead them to a fair settlement which is what she does in the majority of her cases. She is incredibly focused and an extremely good negotiator and tactician. She knows everything that is going on in a case. She is more like a conductor of an orchestra, which is a nice way of putting it because she also loves chamber music."

In fact, Lady Ward is an accomplished classical pianist. At a recent post-legal conference party in St Petersburg (divorce cases increasingly have an international dimension and Russia is a particularly lucrative area for London's family law fraternity), fellow lawyers watched in admiration as she composed herself amid the opulent surroundings of Yusupov Palace and gave a note-perfect, impromptu recital on the grand piano. "She just went to the grand piano and started playing. Everybody gathered around and when she finished we all just applauded," said one lawyer who was there.

Not all lawyers are so ready to cheer her efforts, a result perhaps of fierce rivalry, and perhaps even jealousy of Lady Ward and the cases she has attracted in recent years.

The London network of top divorce lawyers is a relatively small one and dominated - unlike other areas of the law - by women. Some suggest that may be because only women have the empathy to deal with cases that can get incredibly personal. It can also get bitchy. The so-called magic circle of the best divorce solicitors - ranked in the top tier by the legal bible Chambers - includes not only Lady Ward but also Fiona Shackleton (who represented Madonna, Sir Paul McCartney and Prince Charles in their divorces), Diana Parker and Frances Hughes.

Other notable female divorce solicitors include Maggie Rae, who acted for Princess Diana, and Sandra Davis, Gill Doran and Liz Vernon, who is acting for Ecclestone's wife Slavica.

There are similarities between Mrs Shackleton and Lady Ward, both of them rivals for the accolade of Britain's best divorce lawyer. They are both Jewish working mothers in their 50s, workaholics and, interestingly, superb cooks, too. But while Mrs Shackleton is tall and blonde and wears suits in bright shades of pink and yellow, Lady Ward is smaller, darker and wears only dark or black designer suits.

While Mrs Shackleton clearly irked Heather Mills, who tipped water over her in the High Court at the end of her £25 million divorce from McCartney, it appears Lady Ward raises more hackles among her rivals. None of Lady Ward's detractors dared to put their names to criticism but accuse her of being overly aggressive in cases in which they have been involved. One solicitor said: "Barristers always say: 'What's the difference between Fiona and Helen? One is tall, blonde and difficult and the other is short, dark and difficult.' But if you are a solicitor you have most difficulties with Helen. She is a bit of a bully and she doesn't like to lose."

Another said: "She is not easy to deal with. You get an enormous number of letters. I would say it rains correspondence. It is not very helpful. If my client's wife or husband is represented by Helen, my client absolutely loathes her. At the moment there is a lot of resentment [among divorce lawyers] that so much about her cases is in the press."

Lady Ward was born in Golders Green. Her mother was a painter and her father a successful businessman. Helen Gilbert, as she was, attended the fee-paying King Alfred school before studying law at Birmingham University. She qualified as a solicitor in 1978 but while still an articled clerk at the age of 22, she met her husband-to-be, Alan Ward, then a family law barrister.

Some time later Sir Alan, who came to the UK from South Africa because of his disapproval of the apartheid regime, said in a rare interview with the Evening Standard in 1994: "It became obvious that some chemistry was working." He divorced his first wife with whom he had a son and two daughters in 1982 and the following year married the then Miss Gilbert, 14 years his junior.

She herself doesn't always recommend divorce. Her close friend confides: "She will always spend time making sure with a client that a divorce is really what they want. One of the things she will say is: 'Have you thought about the effect on the children and the family as a whole? Divorce comes with a health warning. Why do you want to spend all this money getting divorced?'"

Sir Alan, now 70, and Lady Ward have gone on to become arguably the most powerful couple in family law. He is a Court of Appeal judge who excuses himself from all cases in which Lady Ward or her firm Manches have an interest. Lady Ward has established herself as a brilliant networker whose friends include Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota, and Tessa Jowell, the former culture secretary and now minister for the 2012 Olympics. Jowell's son Matthew was a close friend of Amelia Ward at the time of her death. Jowell dropped her ministerial caseload to spend time comforting her friend Helen.

Lady Ward remains committed to her work but refuses to neglect her family, spending weekends at the family's country home in Suffolk. "Helen is a lawyer who has the phone tucked under her chin while stirring the soup for Sunday lunch," says the close friend.

But just as she has critics, there are also many lawyers who come close to worshipping her. Says one: "When you meet her, you realise she has more charisma in her little finger than any other lawyer. For a woman in her 50s she is incredibly attractive. She has beautiful, raven-haired Jewish good looks."

A senior QC, frequently instructed by Lady Ward, said: "She is sometimes portrayed as aggressive but I really don't think that is part of her make-up at all. She is tenacious. But she also has charm and good nature and incredible skill. She is also very discreet. When you look at the Ritchie/Madonna case, it was settled before anybody really realised it was happening."

The QC adds: "It isn't unusual for her to work 17 or 18 hours a day. Anyone who works with her knows you can get an email timed at three o'clock in the morning and sometimes I do. I am never quite sure that is because she has stayed up late or got up early. She just doesn't need an enormous amount of sleep."

All this will be of comfort to Ecclestone, Ritchie and the 60 or so other clients she has on the go at any one time. Lady Ward may not recommend divorce to her clients but you get the impression she loves every minute of it.