The 2020 version is now available of Gitlin on Divorce: A Guide to Illinois Family Law.
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.
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 from 2019 and those through to March 2020.
The most important development of the case law involves 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., expect a slew of new child support modification cases to come through the system with the critical importance of filing a timely petition for modification. Expect more of these modification cases due to the economic impact of Covid-19.
