Las Vegas Litigation Law Blog

Actor and political pundit Ben Stein has lost the majority of his breach of contract lawsuit against a Japanese company after the company backed out of a deal to have Stein star in commercials for computer printers. Stein had filed the litigation against the company, Kyocera Mita, claiming that the company violated his First Amendment rights and broke his employment contract after finding out his views on climate change.

Stein is best known as an actor and game-show host, but prior to that he was an economist and speechwriter in the Nixon administration. In recent years, he has given support to the theory that changes in the environment are natural, not caused by pollution.

Perhaps it is another sign that you cannot trust everything you see on the Internet: the casino-hotelier Las Vegas Sands Corp. has filed a lawsuit against a website it says copied its own site to commit fraud by luring visitors into buying into an investment opportunity. Sands claims the website looks very similar to the genuine company site, with pictures of the Venetian and Palazzo casinos on the Las Vegas Strip. Unfortunately for Sands, the creators of the website are not known.

According to the complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in Las Vegas on May 1, the website is meant to lure investors to a project that Sands has nothing to do with. Besides the pictures of Sands' holdings, the website allegedly contains pages with headings such as "Company Overview" and "Our Properties."

American International Group Inc. has filed a lawsuit against the founder of its airplane lease division for allegedly stealing company secrets to benefit his new, competing company. The litigation accuses the man and several former executives of downloading information from their computers for the benefit of the new business while still employees of International Lease Finance Corp., a unit of AIG.

Prior to AIG purchasing ILFC for $1.3 billion in 1990, it was an independent company led by its founder. ILFC was one of the first companies to lease planes to airlines. After he sold the company to AIG, the founder remained as president of the unit. But he opposed AIG's move to accept a federal bailout in 2008 after the recession badly damaged the insurance company.

Despite assurances from MGM Mirage executives that a project to build a combination casino and resort on the Las Vegas Strip was "progressing nicely" and "on budget," in reality the project was suffering from construction and financing problems, according to an amended lawsuit filed by a number of MGM shareholders and bond holders on April 17. The lawsuit blames MGM executives for misleading investors and inflating the prices of its securities, only to have those prices plummet once problems with the new construction came to light in 2009.

Two of the shareholders' commercial lawsuits were dismissed in late March for lack of specificity. This time, they have brought a complaint that promises testimony from 10 confidential witnesses the suit describes as executives for MGM, now know as MGM Resorts International, over misinformation allegedly given to shareholders regarding the CityCenter casino and resort, an $8.5 billion project that was abandoned in 2009, at the height of the U.S. recession.