Commercialized Gambling Will Likely Result in More Gambling Dissipation Claims.
Defining Dissipation:
One of the main issues in divorce is property division. The Illinois Marriage and Dissolution of Marriage Act (“IMDMA”) requires a court to consider all relevant factors when dividing marital property, including “dissipation by each party of the marital property.” In re Marriage of Sinha, 2021 IL App (2d) 191129.
Illinois courts define dissipation as the use of marital assets for purposes unrelated to the marriage after the marriage has begun to irretrievably break down. To make a successful dissipation claim, the spouse alleging dissipation must show:
When the marriage began to break down
The specific expenditures that amount to dissipation
How those expenditures served no marital purpose
In Illinois, the timeline matters—dissipation claims usually apply only to actions taken in the last three to five years before divorce filing if alleged in a Notice of Intent to Claim Dissipation filed at least 60 days before trial.
More Gambling = More Dissipation
Gambling, while difficult to discover, has always been a straightforward claim of dissipation. While gambling used to be a vice restricted to those who frequented casinos or used illegal bookies, making it difficult to find evidence, the liberalization of commercial gambling has made a once-expensive endeavor more easily proved.
Online sports gambling has become ubiquitous in the last six years, which inevitably means that online gambling claims of dissipation will become more prevalent in divorce.
There has been a 50% increase in revenue since 2022 with 2023 revenue reportedly at $10.4 billion. A recent meta-data analysis by researchers at the University of Buffalo found that 10% of college students are pathological gamblers, significantly higher than the percentage of pathological gamblers found in the general population (2% - 5%). The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) commissioned a report, Sports Betting Activities Survey April 2023, that showed nearly 60% of surveyed college students have bet on sports and 4% bet daily.
Gambling used to be a morally dubious activity that spouses tended to hide from each other, which made finding dissipation a more time-intensive and expensive divorce issue.
What used to be an unanticipated discovery after looking through hundreds of pages of account and credit card statements or inquiring about random ATM withdraws can now be learned by asking your divorce practitioner to add online betting accounts to their standard discovery requests (Ill. Sup. Ct. Rule 214 Notice to Produce Documents), which are issued to your spouse as part of routine discovery.
