Where I work, we employ a consultant to do a considerable amount of work for us to hold us over until we can hire/train more staff. He has been working with us for quite a long time now, and he has always had this strange habit of leaving his initials on EVERYTHING he touches, as if its his sort of branding or advertising. And by everything, I mean:

• Database names
• Table names
• Variable names
• Web service names
• File names
• Server names
• etc...

Is this a common practice among consultants? We politely asked if he could remove some of the branding, but he typically scoffs and quotes exorbitant time estimates to perform such 'silly' refactorings. I guess we could leave it alone, but it's really annoying to have to type out his name every time we reference something he made. Any recommendations on how to approach this problem?

Edit: Our contract with him states that we "own" everything he makes for us.