Columnist Jeff German: Tab keeps growing for LV slogan

Wednesday, Sept. 14, 2005 | 11:03 a.m.

The legal tab for fixing a $1 slogan deal gone bad at the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority is growing larger by the day.

It turns out that Morrison & Foerster -- the law firm hired to straighten out this mess and steer the taxpayer-financed tourism agency back on a course of public accountability -- submitted legal bills totaling $200,000 for its first month's work.

LVCVA legal counsel Luke Puschnig said Tuesday that the San Francisco-based firm turned in an additional $82,000 bill for the month of July for representing the LVCVA in a trademark infringement lawsuit against a California woman.

That's on top of the $118,000 in fees Morrison & Foerster submitted as part of its investigation into how the trademark rights to the valuable marketing slogan, "What happens here, stays here," wound up in the hands of the LVCVA's longtime advertising agency, R&R Partners.

The firm has yet to submit its legal fees for August and September, which means there's no end in sight yet to the rising public cost of this boondoggle.

"I'm really not to the point that I'm shocked over this," said Henderson Mayor Jim Gibson, who chaired the board in November when LVCVA President Rossi Ralenkotter turned over the slogan to R&R Partners without the board's approval. "This is the kind of money I imagined we might have to spend."

In its investigation Morrison & Foerster found that the $1 deal was done to bolster R&R's legal standing to sue the California woman, Dorothy Tovar, who was marketing a line of risque clothing under the similar logo, "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas."

But the law firm also concluded that the agreement with R&R Partners was bad public policy. The LVCVA, it said, should be retaining possession of its marketing slogans and protecting them in court itself.

By giving up "What happens here, stays here," the LVCVA lost out on a chance to make money exploiting the popularity of the slogan through the sale of souvenirs such as T-shirts and coffee mugs.

Morrison & Foerster has made a series of recommendations, all adopted by a special committee of the LVCVA board last week, aimed at making sure that bad deals like this don't happen again.

What the law firm discovered is that there were no written policies in place at the LVCVA to keep its executives in check. The public's investment in the tourism agency, which has a $190 million annual budget, has been unprotected for years.

The LVCVA, for example, doesn't even have a formal ethics and conflict of interest policy to govern the conduct of its executives and employees.

"We're doing it one day at a time," Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman, the board's current chairman, said after the Morrison & Foerster recommendations were presented to the entire board on Tuesday. "We're trying to correct many years of policy-less activity."

Goodman said he knows the public is paying a high price here.

But he added: "We're putting policies in place to make sure the public will have confidence in how we do business -- and that's priceless."