We’ve seen it with companies like Enron and Worldcom, where employees are told by management to bend the law and company rules or to outright break them. How can Schneiderman suddenly claim something that has been considered “lawful” for the last eight years to all of a sudden be “unlawful”?
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Boies noted that the dispute in NY isn’t about how the daily fantasy sports games are marketed.
Boies also referenced baseball great Pete Rose, who was banned from the game for betting on the sport and his own team. A trial likely would not take place for months. The MA government states that they were carefully monitoring the DFS industry from the beginning of 2015 and the proposal consists of suggestions that will mitigate the risks their study highlighted. The companies are appealing the injunction.
David Boies, chairman of Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP and counsel to DraftKings, said the company would look to file an appeal if judge Manuel Mendez rules against the company following a hearing Wednesday. “If most people lose money and the same people continue to win repeatedly, that is absolute proof that this is a game of skill we are talking about and not a game of chance”. Baker last week said he played a free version of a DraftKings game on his cell phone and concluded it was a game of skill.
On Friday, Eric T. Schneiderman released an opinion piece to the NY Daily News arguing his reasons for booting daily fantasy sports out of NY State seemingly out of the blue.
After the NY attorney general declared the daily fantasy sports to be illegal gambling, DraftKings hired Boies and Jonathan Schiller, who together founded the law firm of Boies Schiller & Flexner, as outside counsel.
Shutting down in NY would be unfair to DraftKings customers “because the attorney general – however well-intentioned – has changed his mind as to whether this is legal or not without taking that question to the court”, Boies, one of the country’s best-known trial lawyers, said. Both DraftKings and FanDuel defend themselves by arguing that their contests are games of skill.
Schneiderman said in his Daily News column that 89% of one site’s players are losers, despite the endless ads from DraftKings and FanDuel that promise easy money.
First, here’s a spreadsheet described as “a true and correct copy of a spreadsheet that was collected in NYAG’s investigation entitled ‘State Level Data.'” In one of his filings, Schneiderman wrote: “In 2014 alone, DraftKings processed more than $25 million of wagers from NY residents”.
FanDuel is an Internet-based daily fantasy sports site dealing in fantasy sports leagues.
Contests involving college sports would also be banned in MA, and daily fantasy sports would be prohibited from extending credit to players. Yahoo has also been added to the inquiry from the attorney general and has not stopped operations in the state, the NY Times.
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McKenna spoke on behalf of DraftKings, FanDuel and the Fantasy Sports Trade Association to a state Senate work session, which pondered an evolving bill to legalize low-stakes, season-long fantasy leagues. “The few narrow exceptions that exist – which do not include sports betting – all come with strong regulation and oversight to ensure fairness and protect New Yorkers from fraud”.
