Resorts World Las Vegas denies Strip competitor Wynn Resorts’ charge that the $4 billion mega-casino it is building across the street is illegally copying the exterior look of Wynn Las Vegas and Encore.
In a formal response to a lawsuit Wynn filed in U.S. District Court last month alleging “architectural trade dress” infringement, attorneys for Resorts World said their client’s design “will look dramatically different from Wynn’s properties, dispelling any suggestion that a reasonable consumer could confuse the two resorts for each other.”
The response blasted Wynn’s suit as a “heavy-handed, holiday-timed filing” aimed at shutting down a “business competitor.”
The suit “suffers from a fatal flaw,” Resorts World’s filing says, because it is based on “speculative extrapolation regarding the appearance” of the 3,000-room Resorts World Las Vegas, which is slated for a 2020 opening.
The filing adds that the public interest would be best served by allowing the two companies to compete “unencumbered from the constraints imposed by judicial intervention.”
Wynn’s suit says it has trademarked, and owns, the exclusive right in Nevada to utilize “architectural trade dress” in its buildings, which includes properties in Las Vegas and Macau as well as the under-construction Encore Boston Harbor in Everett, Mass. Resorts World, it claims, is pursuing a design aimed at “misleading the public into falsely believing that it is affiliated with, sponsored by or associated with (the company), when it is not.”
The suit seeks an injunction halting construction of Resorts World’s glass exterior and damages, which, if granted, would result in losses to Resorts World totaling $169 million and the immediate dismissal of some 500 construction workers, according to Resorts World.
Resorts World supplied new renderings of the under-construction casino hotel in support of its filing, which aims to address the core claims in Wynn’s suit. And interestingly, the “bands” were receiving a new coat of red paint, which differentiates them from the Wynn/Encore tan bands.
It maintains that its concave tower shape is the same as the footprint for Boyd Gaming’s Echelon, the halted project on the site which Resorts World purchased in 2013.
Resorts World incorporated the unfinished building into its designs, it says, with bronze glass that is a popular color and non-proprietary.
As for the hotel tower’s exterior “banding,” another point of contention, it is designed to “catch up-lighting at night” and allow the tower to be illuminated, the company said, adding that the banding will ultimately be red in color once construction is complete.
Wynn isn’t buying it.
“Resorts World’s newly created exterior renderings, dated 2019 and well after the filing of our complaint, are merely drawings which do not reflect the actual construction directly across the street from our resort,” the company said in an e-mail to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “We will continue to pursue our legal claims and injunctive relief in this matter.”
