The 2022 version of Gitlin on Divorce: A Guide to Illinois Family Law will soon be available.
By way of background, from 2015 to 2019 nearly all of Illinois statutory law has changed. These changes include:
- 2015: Original maintenance guidelines.
- 2016: 8-year process of updating Illinois family law saw its conclusion with:
- Illinois Marriage and Dissolution of Marriage Act (IMDMA) Rewrite;
- New parentage act–the Illinois Parentage Act of 2015 (effective 1/1/16);
- 1/1/2017: The Technical Corrections Act to the Rewrite to the IMDMA (companion animals and name change as part of divorce judgment).
- 7/1/2017: Income shares for child support.
- 2018: Maintenance guidelines amendments including more granular approach to presumptive lengths of maintenance and other changes.
- 2019: Major rewrite to the maintenance guidelines.
We also had a host of statutory changes in 2021 with more on the way in 2022. The key 2021 and 2022 amendments that are now integrated into the 5th Edition of Gitlin on Divorce are:
- Technical changes made to the IMDMA based on case law (Pub. Act 102-349);
- Court-ordered retainers based upon an affidavit (102-480);
- *A host of changes to the child support health insurance provisions within § 505.2 (Pub. Act 102-87);
- *New law addressing temporary relocation (Pub. Act 102-143);
- “Hope Cards” in domestic violence cases;
- New law regarding foreseeability involving modification of child support and maintenance obligations
Now that the dust has started to settle, we seeing a wave of appellate court cases attempt to make sense of the meaning of the wholesale changes to Illinois family law. The newest version of Gitlin on Divorce: A Guide to Illinois Family Law incorporates all of the significant changes in the statutory law and includes all of the important cases.
Important developments in 2019-20 involved modification of child support and maintenance.
This is because those with a higher income pay far less under the current law than under our the law prior to income shares. Yet the changes to the statute itself cannot be grounds for modification in showing a substantial change in circumstances. Therefore, with potential income reductions, etc., we are seeing a slew of new child support modification cases to come through the system with the critical importance of filing a timely petition for modification.
