$30 million gift from Robert and Joan Clifford renames law school
Robert Clifford grew up in a South Side Chicago neighborhood people called Mudville, because it was the last part of the city to get paved streets.
He was the first in his family to go to college.
All through high school he worked in a lumberyard for his father, a carpenter, and he figured he would take up the same trade. He applied to one college, DePaul, and later to one law school, DePaul. As an undergraduate, he met Joan, an education student who would become his wife of 53 years.
Decades later, his name is going on the law school’s front door.
DePaul University announced this week that Robert Clifford, a business graduate who went on to earn his law degree there and later an honorary doctorate, and Joan Clifford, a College of
Education graduate, has given $30 million to the College of Law.
In recognition, the school, founded in 1897 and part of DePaul since 1912, is now the Robert A. Clifford College of Law.
The timing is personal too.
The gift comes as Robert celebrates his 50th reunion with his law school.
classmates.
“Joan and I are proud to further the excellence and mission of the College of Law,” Robert Clifford said.
“My own DePaul education, informed by DePaul’s Vincentian values that honor the dignity of every person, played a foundational role in my own career journey and
perspective. We’re honored to give back and help current and future generations of law students and legal professionals succeed while making a difference in the civil justice system.”
The gift is built to touch every part of the law school.
Its signature piece is the new Robert A. Clifford Trial Advocacy, Litigation, and Negotiation Center.
The center will offer integrated, skills-based training, send DePaul students to national mock trial and negotiation competitions, and give alumni a clear way to mentor students in the courtroom skills that defined Clifford’s own career.
The gift also creates the Robert A. Clifford College of Law Endowment.
The endowment funds Clifford Excellence Scholarships for high-achieving
students who show the Vincentian values of integrity, compassion, service, and ethics.
It also funds the Clifford Distinguished Faculty Fellows, a three-year program that provides professors with research support and ends with a mini symposium on their work for scholars and practitioners.
The endowment will also support technology upgrades, seed money for new programs, and the
school’s highest priorities. And it secures the long-term future of the Clifford Symposium on Tort Law & Social Policy, the program most closely tied to the Clifford name at DePaul.
“This extraordinary gift honors Bob’s distinguished career while shaping the future of legal education at DePaul for generations to come,” said DePaul President Robert L. Manuel, who
thanked the couple for “their longstanding partnership and their unwavering belief in DePaul’s Catholic and Vincentian mission.” Dean Geoffrey Rapp said the investment “will help define the future of legal education at DePaul,” letting the school combine the strength of Chicago’s legal community with rigorous academics and hands-on experience. The commitment also counts toward Mission: Forward, DePaul’s $650 million comprehensive campaign.
Katie Fraumann, who leads the university’s advancement division, called the couple “inspiring role models” whose generosity will motivate others to give.
The career behind the name started in a DePaul classroom. As a law student, Clifford heard the legendary Chicago trial lawyer Philip Corboy speak to his tort law class.
He approached Corboy and Corboy was impressed enough by the young student’s boldness to hire him as a clerk and then as a lawyer.
Clifford opened his own firm in 1984.
Clifford Law Offices has since become one of the country’s best-known plaintiffs’ firms, representing families in nearly every major commercial air crash in the United States since 1979. Clifford served as lead counsel in the federal litigation over the 2019 Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX crash, and the firm reports more than $5 billion in verdicts and settlements.
He has led the Chicago Bar Association, chaired the American Bar Association’s Litigation Section, and served on the Board of Overseers of the RAND Institute for Civil Justice.
For Clifford, his bond with the law school has long been about ideas as much as money. More than three decades ago, he endowed the Robert A. Clifford Chair on Tort Law & Social Policy, the college’s first endowed chair and, at the time, the largest single gift in the school’s history.
The annual Clifford Symposium followed, a free two-day gathering that, over the years, brought judges, scholars, and practitioners from across the country to debate the civil justice system.
More recently, the Clifford Scholar-in-Residence program began, now in its sixth year, bringing each year a rising civil-justice scholar to campus for a workshop and public lecture, paired with a response from a senior commentator.
The new gift makes that long commitment permanent.
The DePaul gift also completes a circle that began before college. Clifford often credits Al Brazen, the dean of discipline at Marist High School, for seeing his academic potential and pushing him toward college. “It’s all about forks in the road,” Clifford has said.
“What if I wasn’t at school that day and he didn’t have that conversation with me?”
At a Marist alumni gala, where he was named a Distinguished Alumnus, he announced a $1 million gi for scholarships and financial aid and pledged to match the evening’s fundraising. “Every kid deserves a chance at a great education,” he said.
The Cliffords had already supported Marist’s Faith and the Future campaign, which turned the Marist Brothers’ former monastery into a 28,000-square-foot science center and planetarium, where the forensics crime lab carries their name.
If Robert’s giving has centered on the law and education, Joan has led the couple into the cultural life of Chicago, and she has done it from the top.
After teaching, she started and ran travel agencies in Chicago and London.
She later became director of firm administration at Clifford Law Offices and a docent at the Chicago History Museum. At the Goodman Theatre she served as president of the Women’s Board, joined the Board of Trustees, and rose to chair it, leading the theater’s Endowing Excellence Campaign along the way.
The Cliffords are listed among the Grand Benefactors at the $1 million-plus level in the Goodman’s Centennial Campaign, and a star with both their names is set in the Walk of Fame outside the theater on Dearborn Street.
Lawyers for the Creative Arts gave the couple its Distinguished Service Award for their volunteer and philanthropic work in the arts. Joan also serves on the American Writers Museum board of trustees.
Their giving reaches well beyond Chicago. In Southwest Florida, the couple served for more than a decade as trustees of the Naples Children & Education Foundation, which runs the Naples Winter Wine Festival, one of the country’s most successful charity auctions. Robert chaired the foundation’s board, and Joan co-chaired its grant committee, and both are now lifetime trustees.
As festival chairs, they helped raise $12.2 million for programs serving at-risk and underprivileged children in the region.
“We wanted to maintain the focus on the children whom we are serving,” Robert said of that work.
They have also long supported Camillus House, which serves people experiencing homelessness in South Florida. Back home, Clifford’s decades of support for WTTW and WFMT, together with his firm’s, helps pay for closed captioning on all of WTTW’s public broadcasts, and he is a founding and sustaining member of the Chicago Bar Foundation’s Investing in Justice campaign for legal aid and pro bono services.
The family’s commitment is carrying into the next generation.
The couple’s daughter Erin Clifford, an attorney, sits alongside her father on WTTW’s board of trustees and serves on the boards of the Chicago High School for the Arts and Friends of Prentice, while also championing mental health support for lawyers. Their daughter Tracy works in Chicago as a fashion stylist.
Through the firm’s community work, Clifford Law Offices has also partnered with Cristo Rey Jesuit High School for decades, training more than 120 students through its corporate work-study program.
Taken together, the Cliffords’ giving points in one consistent direction: toward the schools, stages, and institutions that open doors for people who might otherwise be shut out.
A carpenter’s son who once assumed he’d spend his life in a lumberyard now has his name on the
law school where his career began, and the gift that put it there is meant to give the next first-generation student from a neighborhood like Mudville the same opening.
“Our hope,” Robert Clifford said, “is that this gift will offer more opportunities to the students of the future and will continue the tradition of legal excellence for generations of lawyers to come.