Matthew J. McKissick

Nevada counsel to MGM Resorts International and MGM Growth Properties LLC in connection with forming a joint venture with Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust to acquire the Las Vegas real estate assets of the MGM Grand and Mandalay Bay for $4.6 billion. Concurrent with the acquisition, MGM Resorts entered into a master lease to lease from the joint venture and operate both properties.

Nevada counsel to MGM Resorts International in Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust’s $4.2 billion acquisition of Bellagio real estate from MGM and lease back to MGM. This sale has been said to be the single largest resort sale in Las Vegas’ history.

Successfully defended the revolutionary speaker company Auratone, LLC against allegations that Auratone had abandoned its famous trademark AURATONE. In the 1950s, Auratone began selling studio monitors for recording artists and music producers. Over the decades, Auratone achieved widespread recognition, becoming the go-to speaker for artists from Quincy Jones and Kenny Rogers to Adele and Lady Gaga. Most notably, Auratone’s speakers were used to record the highest-selling album of all time—Michael Jackson’s Thriller. After a foreign-based company began using the mark AURATONE to sell its own speakers, alleging that Auratone had abandoned its trademark, Brownstein successfully argued that Auratone retained its trademark rights since its inception, despite the lapse of its federal trademark registration in the early 2000s following the death of the company’s founder.

Retained by the popular stock-trading platform Robinhood to defend it against a federal lawsuit brought by O’Shea Jackson, the 90s-era rapper professionally known as “Ice Cube.” The rapper-turned-actor alleged that Robinhood impermissibly used Ice Cube’s image and likeness by incorporating an image from the 2007 film “Are We Done Yet?” together with the caption “correct yourself before you wreck yourself”—a play on the oft-parodied slang phrase “check yourself before you wreck yourself”—in Robinhood’s monthly editorial newsletter about stock market corrections. Robinhood defeated Ice Cube’s false endorsement claim under the Lanham Act on the second try.