Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Slogan stays in Vegas, money leaves

Amount R&R Partners paid the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority for the rights to What happens here, stays here slogan:

$1

Amount the authority spent undoing a legal mess to get the slogan back:

$803,426

Number of embarrassing headaches this has caused the LVCVA and R&R?:

Endless

What happens here may stay here, but one thing that won't be staying here is the more than $780,000 that the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority has had to pay California and Reno law firms to reclaim the rights to its popular marketing slogan.

With no public discussion last month, the convention authority board voted unanimously to take back the rights to "What happens here, stays here."

It was a swift and unceremonious ending to one of the costliest and most embarrassing gaffes ever made by the taxpayer-funded authority.

According to LVCVA officials, the tourism agency over the past 18 months racked up $803,426 in legal bills - all but $17,082 of it to non-Las Vegas firms - trying to undo the mess caused by the secretive deal under which the award-winning slogan was sold for $1 to its longtime marketing firm R&R Partners.

The deal was struck Nov. 9, 2004, by authority Chief Executive Rossi Ralenkotter and R&R Partners President Billy Vassiliadis, without the knowledge of the 13-member board, to bolster a trademark infringement lawsuit filed months earlier by the advertising agency on behalf of the LVCVA.

The suit was filed in federal court against Dorothy Tovar, a California woman who was marketing a line of risque clothing under the similar trademark, "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas."

Authority spokesman Vince Alberta said the experience of getting "What happens here, stays here" back has taught the LVCVA to recognize the value of its award-winning trademark.

"This branding campaign has been the most successful in the history of the tourism industry," he said.

"What we learned is that we will operate on a premise that future campaigns will be just as successful, and we will do everything necessary to clearly protect the trademark and give us the flexibility to enforce it."

Following a series of Sun columns and stories on the slogan deal, LVCVA board members turned to the San Francisco law firm of Morrison & Foerster in July 2005 for legal help.

Since then, LVCVA officials said, the agency has paid Morrison & Foerster a total of $760,032 in legal fees and expenses.

The tab for representing the authority in the Tovar lawsuit, which it won in August, is $544,510, officials said. Morrison & Foerster also submitted bills totaling $215,522 for investigating the ill-fated slogan sale and making recommendations to prevent such agreements in the future.

In ruling in the LVCVA's favor last summer, U.S. District Judge Larry Hicks also found that the tourism agency had improperly turned over the trademark rights to the slogan to R&R Partners.

The authority's legal costs also include $26,312 in bills from two Reno law firms - McDonald Carano Wilson and Georgeson, Thompson & Angaran - that assisted in the Tovar litigation, officials said.

And the Las Vegas law firm of Schreck Brignone, which is merging with a Denver firm, has received $17,082 so far as part of an ongoing arrangement approved by the LVCVA board to protect the slogan from other potential trademark infringements.

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