Want your name on a law school? Looks like all you need are big stacks of cash.

In the past month alone, the University of Pennsylvania's law school received a record-breaking $125 million from the W.P. Carey Foundation to become the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, or "Carey Law;" Pepperdine University got $50 million from real estate developer Richard Caruso and is now home to the Pepperdine University Rick J. Caruso School of Law; and the University of Kentucky plans to rebrand its law school as the University of Kentucky J. David Rosenberg College of Law in honor of the new namesake's $20 million gift.

The amount of money law campuses can bring in for naming rights depends on the school and its donor base, and recent history shows that major gifts and campus rebrandings can get tricky. Despite the potential for student backlash and donor meddling, it seems that the era of big-ticket law school giving combined with naming rights is the new normal.

Several elite law schools are likely to follow suit in the not-too-distant future, said Dan Rodriguez, the former dean of Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, who in 2015 helped his school secure $100 million from the Pritzker family. Northwestern became the first law school in the so-called T-14 to rename for a donor.

"I can tell you by my own conversations with deans among law schools in the T-14 cohort that there are a number of them actively in conversations about gifts, the magnitude of which would probably entail the renaming of the school," he said this week, though he declined to identify which law schools are in such talks. "I was not surprised Penn renamed their law school at that level. I've talked to a number of deans, and that's basically the price tag."

It's unlikely that any T-14 law school would rename itself for anything less than nine figures now that Penn and Northwestern have established that threshold, Rodriguez said.

So just how much would it take to get your name on Harvard Law School? An informal poll of 10 law deans and legal education experts this week yielded estimates ranging from $150 million to $1 billion, though most predictions fell in the range of $200 to $500 million. A few said the famed Cambridge school likely would never rebrand. (A Harvard Law spokesman declined to comment on  whether the school is considering or would consider renaming itself for a donor.)

Nearly a quarter of American Bar Association-accredited law schools are currently named for an individual. Among those 45 schools, 23 bear the names of donors or were renamed for someone as a result of a donation. The remainder are named for historical figures—think Thomas Jefferson School of Law or the John Marshall Law School—or people who were key to the school's history. Eight are named for former U.S. Supreme Court justices, while another eight bear the names of their founders, former deans or university officials.

Thus, fewer than 9% of law schools at present are named for donors, and all but four of those rebrandings occurred during the past 20 years. The last decade has been particularly lucrative, with 13 law schools revising their names in honor of donors.

Still, legal education lags behind other academic programs when it comes to embracing the value of naming rights, said Terry Burton, a consultant whose firm Dig In Research specializes in naming rights. Business schools in particular recognized the potential of naming rights early on, and the practice generally lacks stigma in that corner of academia, he said. Penn's Wharton School of Business and the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business enjoy widespread name recognition and prestige, he noted. Burton has been hired by a half-dozen law schools, including Pepperdine, to help them determine the value of their naming rights.

"Law schools are just starting to pick up in momentum, as far as naming rights activity," he said. "In my opinion, many law schools have undervalued the asset, which is the name."

A law school's position in the U.S. News & World Report ranking is a factor in the amount of money it can command for naming rights—there's a significant difference between No. 7-ranked Penn's $125 million gift and No. 71-ranked Kentucky's $20 million—but it's not the only one, Burton noted. Elite schools that tend to send graduates on to higher-paying jobs right from the start also generally have more alumni with pockets deep enough to make significant gifts.

In addition to comparable gifts at other law schools and other academic programs at the home campus, Burton looks at a school's alumni and supporter base, the momentum around its program and larger university, and various other intangibles when providing a range for what he thinks its naming rights are worth.

Law schools and other academic institutions are also motivated by behind-the-scene factors that aren't always obvious, such as financial shortfalls, so it's difficult to determine the worth of a program's naming rights without delving into its particulars, Burton said. (He declined to speculate about the value of Harvard Law's naming rights, for instance.) But schools must be smart about accepting donations tied to naming rights, given that nearly all such agreements are in perpetuity.

"As soon as one is named, it's off the market," he said. "It's one and done."

For the University of Kentucky's law school, administrators feel confident that $20 million is the right amount for naming rights. An endowment of that amount will supply about 10% of the law school's $11 million annual budget going forward, said Mike Richey, the university's vice president for philanthropy.

"For public universities, given the nature of our mission to lift up our state and university, $20 million is likely to be as transformational for us as a a much larger gift might be for a different type of school," said interim law Dean Mary Davis. "We're small. We have 400 students and 35 faculty. So per capita, if you think of it that way, this $20 million is extraordinary as far as what it can do for us. It's relative."

Among the catalysts for the new wave of law school mega-gifts is the increasing price tag of delivering a quality legal education, said Roger Dennis, the former dean of the Drexel University Thomas R. Kline School of Law, which was renamed for donors twice during his tenure. Rising costs have put ever more pressure on law deans to seek out donor funding.

"Legal education isn't on the cheap anymore," Dennis said. "There's the need for financial aid, the need to attract and retain excellent faculty, diversify curriculum and build fancy buildings. The university and its law school are clearly looking to close the gap between what tuition raises and what an excellent law school needs to fund its operations, and naming rights are the form of the transaction for those kinds of transformational gifts."

It's increasingly unlikely that major law school gifts will come from donors in the traditional practice of law, according to both Burton and Dennis. While a few schools have been named for trial attorneys, most of those recent mega-gifts have been from lawyers who made their fortune in other areas, such as real estate and finance or from corporate foundations. A corporate attorney making $5 million a year is undoubtedly successful, Dennis noted, but that income level isn't usually enough to bestow a naming-level gift.

Headaches

Securing that big check doesn't guarantee smooth sailing for a law school, however, and there are more than a few recent examples of the problems that can arise.

Penn Law is facing backlash from some students and alumni who are opposed to the new official shorthand of "Carey Law" and are demanding a return to the old "Penn Law" nickname. (School administrators said this week that they are considering adding "Penn" back to the official shorthand, but returning the "Penn Law" is not an option.)

Rodriguez said he heard from more than a few unhappy students and alumni after Northwestern adopted the Pritzker moniker. Some worried that it would hurt the law school's brand—in part because no other elite law school had renamed for a donor yet—while others felt the donation amount was too low to trigger a renaming. But the majority of the law school community was supportive of the change, and the criticism eventually dissipated, he said

Some students and faculty at George Mason University protested the 2016 renaming of its law school for the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on the grounds that his jurisprudence hurt minorities, women and the LGBTQ community, among other concerns. The school had received a $10 million donation from the Charles Koch Foundation and another $20 million from an anonymous donor—later revealed to be the BH Fund, a group whose president is Federalist Society Executive Vice President Leonard Leo—to bear the Scalia name.

And then there is the University of Alabama's renaming debacle, which unfolded in public last summer as the relationship between name donor Hugh Culverhouse, Jr. and the law school fell apart. The Miami-area attorney and businessman committed more than $26 million to the law school in the fall of 2018, and it was renamed the University of Alabama Hugh F. Culverhouse School of Law. But university officials said Culverhouse began improperly asserting himself into law school decision-making and in June the university returned his money and stripped his name from the law school. (Culverhouse initially said his opposition to Alabama's abortion ban was the cause of the rift.)

In some cases, as with George Mason, the controversies blow over with time. But as was the case with Alabama, sometimes schools and donors must part ways.

Finding the proper amount for a naming donation can also be difficult, especially as a school's fortunes shift. Drexel University in 2008 accepted $15 million from businessman and former ambassador to Finland Earle Mack and named the newly opened school for him. But by 2013, Drexel needed more money and removed the Mack name with his blessing. A year later, it announced a $50 million naming gift from trial attorney Thomas R. Kline.

For schools named after key historical figures, such as Arizona State University Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law, offering up naming rights to major donors simply isn't an option. (The school was renamed for the first female justice in 2006, and O'Connor has remained involved with the campus ever since.)

That's not necessarily a bad thing, asserts Arizona State law Dean Douglas Sylvester. Having naming rights off the table has forced the Phoenix school to cultivate a broad base of potential donors, even if the amounts of those gifts are generally smaller. The school has also gotten creative about naming facilities, professorships and programs, he said.

Securing one major naming gift poses the risk that the recipient school will become too dependent on that single source of funding, or on the priorities of a single high-profile donor, Sylvester said. Donors may initially seem hands-off, but become more demanding over time, he added. But the benefits will outweigh the drawbacks for many law schools.

"I do think we're at a moment where there are very large endowments available from potential donors, if you can find the right kinds of matches," he said. "The pressure is on."

Rodriguez predicts that $100 million-plus donations to law schools will become the status quo in the foreseeable future, helped in part by Northwestern and Penn's willingness to rebrand for big money.

"I think it's important and laudable for law schools, including those in the very highest tier, to work hard to solicit donations that give schools the funds to make an impactful difference and reduce the tuition demands on students," he said. "In our lifetime, the majority of T-14 law schools will be named. The question is when, rather than whether."