The future of daily fantasy sports could hang in the balance today as N.Y. Supreme Court Judge Manuel Mendez this afternoon will hear competing arguments from FanDuel, DraftKings and New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman in their ongoing dispute. FanDuel and DraftKings are seeking to block a bid by Schneiderman to temporarily shut down operations by each company in the state, while the attorney general is challenging the legality of daily fantasy operations under state gambling laws.
The scheduled one-hour emergency hearing in lower Manhattan will not resolve the core question of whether daily fantasy is legal under New York law, and Mendez today will hear arguments on whether to grant any of the parties a preliminary injunction pending a larger trial. It is not known whether Mendez will rule from the bench today. Each party will have about 20 minutes to present their argument.
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In part because of the brevity of today’s scheduled hearing, each of the parties over the past two days have filed large amounts of written documents into the court docket to supplement their positions. DraftKings’ filings include submissions from two university statistics professors, another trained in econometrics and qualitative methods, and individual players, each supporting the company’s position that daily fantasy is overwhelmingly a game of skill and requires significant work to succeed. DraftKings CEO and co-Founder
Jason Robins also filed an affidavit. “Not once did the N.Y. AG request data related to the skillfulness of DraftKings’ product,” he said.
FanDuel submitted a similar batch of documents, including statistics indicating that only 30 of more than 339,000 players in New York in the company’s history have net losses in excess of $50,000 on the site. “There is no reason to think that all, or even most, of the players who have lost these amounts have an addiction,” said FanDuel Chief Product Officer Tom Griffiths in a companion filing. “Many of them simply love sports and the competition that DFS provides and have the resources to spend on pursuing that position. But even if one were to assume that all of them had a problem, the numbers….have led me to conclude that FanDuel is not an attractive forum for problem gamblers.”
Meanwhile, Schneiderman’s office filed a 40-page memorandum attacking the daily fantasy operator’s arguments and underlying legal theories, and also submitted numerous supporting documents linking daily fantasy to various forms of gambling. “The DFS operators can only stitch together a patchwork of clearly outdated, irrelevant out-of-state case law and arguments about games that look nothing like DFS,” the state’s filing reads in part.
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LEGAL REPRESENTATION
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| DRAFTKINGS |
FANDUEL |
| David Boies (Boies, Schiller and Flexner) |
Marc Zwillinger (ZwillGen PLLC) |
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John Kiernan (Debevoise & Plimpton LLP) |
