The most revealing case in Mark Tratos's career contains almost no words. Teller, the famously silent half of Penn & Teller, had spent decades performing Shadows, an illusion in which he appears to cut the leaves and flower from a rose by slicing its shadow on a screen. When another magician posted a similar routine online and offered to explain its secret, Teller went to court. Tratos helped pursue the copyright claim. A federal judge concluded that the pantomime, not merely the mechanism behind it, was protectable dramatic expression.
That distinction is the key to Tratos's work. Entertainment arrives as movement, light, reputation, memory and noise. The lawyer's task is to decide which part can be owned, licensed, defended or sold. On the Las Vegas Strip, where a building can be a brand and a dead singer can return as a hologram, the abstractions have unusually bright costumes.
Tratos has built a nearly half-century practice around those abstractions. His published client list runs from performers Ozzy Osbourne and David Copperfield to the estates of Orson Welles and Anthony Quinn; from visual artists Vladimir Kush and Peter Lik to boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr.; from Disney and Pixar to resorts whose names are themselves destinations. It reads like an eccentric dinner party. The common guest is ownership.
A local education in intangible things
Born in Price, Utah, in 1952, Tratos came of age professionally in Nevada. He earned a political-science degree from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 1974 and a law degree from Lewis & Clark in 1979. By 1980 he was teaching a UNLV course called Entertainment Law: Representing the Artist & Entertainer. It was an early declaration of subject and place. Las Vegas was already fluent in spectacle, but its working grammar of rights, contracts and attribution was still being written.
He later co-founded Quirk & Tratos, an intellectual-property and entertainment boutique with a national art-law practice. Its lawyers dealt not only with infringement but also with the provenance of paintings, traveling exhibitions, museum acquisitions, gallery consignments and photographic licenses. The work insisted that a creative object never travels alone. Title, permission, reputation and history trail behind it like invisible luggage.
In 2005, the boutique's 13 lawyers joined Greenberg Traurig to open its Las Vegas office. Tratos explained the move in terms of the clients: they were growing globally and needed international support. The local specialty did not dissolve into a larger firm. It became the office's organizing idea. Tratos remains its founding shareholder.
“As our clients continue to grow globally, we recognized our ability to provide quality international support was vital.”Mark Tratos, on the 2005 combination
The invisible architecture of a show
When a name becomes a stage
Long before name, image and likeness became a phrase attached to college athletes, Tratos was working on the right of publicity. He has described the surprise of watching a new intellectual-property right take shape after law school. Nevada was an especially lively laboratory. Tribute acts are part of the Strip's ecology, and the state's law created exceptions for film, television and live performance.
The question sounds philosophical until a ticket is sold. Who controls the commercial use of a voice, a photograph or a familiar silhouette? When does homage become appropriation? Can an impersonator perform an icon without purchasing the icon's identity? Nevada's answer made room for stage traditions such as Legends in Concert. Technology then sharpened the stakes. A hologram can occupy a stage; it can also turn a person's likeness into infinitely repeatable inventory.
“It's both the technology and having control over the right of publicity that gives you that opportunity.”Mark Tratos, on digital performance
His matters repeatedly make the intangible concrete. He represented Peter Lik in the negotiation and completion of the reported $6.5 million sale of Phantom, a black-and-white photograph made in Arizona's Antelope Canyon. He represented Rachel Robinson in litigation involving images of Jackie Robinson on bobbleheads and statues. He worked on domain-name enforcement for casino brands including Bellagio, Mirage, MGM Grand, Wynn and Golden Nugget. He represented nine of what his firm described as the world's 12 largest resorts on brand strategy and infringement disputes.
The glamour is incidental. Much of the craft is classification followed by paperwork. A website contains code, photographs, copy, type and perhaps music, each carrying a different owner and permission. A live show might contain choreography, a performer's persona, union rules, music licenses and contractual limits. Tratos's Lewis & Clark course asks students to draft through precisely this thicket. Its stated objective for entertainment is plain: expand the audience while preserving the greatest number of future uses for the creative work.
Building places, then filling them
Tratos's Las Vegas record is not confined to protecting what other people built. In 1984, he and Robin Greenspun helped arrange a partnership between the Junior League of Las Vegas and the Allied Arts Council to create a nonprofit children's institution. The museum opened in 1990 and later moved beside The Smith Center in Symphony Park. Now called DISCOVERY Children's Museum, it remains a hands-on counterpoint to the adult fantasies a few blocks away. Tratos is still listed on its Chairman's Advisory Council.
The cultural work kept accumulating. He has served on The Smith Center's board and chaired its Board of Advisors. He led the National Judicial College's Board of Trustees. He has been chairman of the Lewis & Clark Law School Board of Visitors and a trustee of Lewis & Clark College. The institutions differ in audience, but they share a practical premise: culture requires rooms, rules, funding and patient governance before it can produce a moment of wonder.
This is the less cinematic side of a career in entertainment law. Tratos helped create places where children could play, audiences could hear an orchestra and law students could learn to read a contract. Las Vegas understands that a stage does not appear by magic. Someone has to secure the site, gather partners, make the agreements and keep the doors open.
The handoff is part of the work
Tratos's 2023-2025 chairmanship of the American Bar Association's Forum on the Entertainment & Sports Industries offers the clearest view of his later priorities. In his outgoing letter, he spoke less about doctrine than connection. He urged lawyers to attend programs and join a mentorship effort pairing younger practitioners and students with experienced members. He wrote that the friendships made through the forum had made his own practice more enjoyable and given him experiences he would treasure.
His successor, Stephen Weizenecker, supplied the view from the other chair. Years earlier, Tratos had invited him to help with a 50-state survey of post-mortem publicity rights as the Marilyn Monroe estate was reshaping the field. Weizenecker called Tratos a mentor, law partner and dear friend. He credited him with the forum's mentorship initiative, speed-mentoring sessions and a renewed Board of Councilors.
There is an appealing symmetry here. The young lawyer who began teaching in 1980 eventually made mentorship an institutional program. The attorney who built a career organizing rights also organized professional relationships. Knowledge, like a photograph or a stage act, has a future only when its terms of transfer are clear.
“The deep friendships and joyful acquaintances that I have made through my membership in the Forum have made my practice more enjoyable.”Mark Tratos, concluding his term as chair
His current résumé still moves at show-business speed: copyright and trademark matters, digital-media questions, art, sports, casinos and new technologies. Recent recognition extends through the 2026 editions of Chambers USA, Managing IP and World Trademark Review. In fall 2026, he was listed for an ABA conference conversation on audits in the era of digital streaming. The medium keeps changing, which is rather the point.
Yet the durable part of Tratos's career is not a list of celebrities. It is a method. Start with the thing an audience values. Identify the person who made it. Define what may travel, who may use it and what must remain under the creator's control. Then build an institution sturdy enough to teach the next lawyer how to do the same. Las Vegas can make anything appear. Mark Tratos has spent his working life making sure disappearance is governed by the contract.