The University of Pittsburgh School of Law has announced a $1 million gift from alumni David and Dawne Hickton to establish an endowment for the school's Elder Law Clinic.

Clinic students provide legal advice to elderly individuals in Allegheny County as well as training to caregivers, social workers, physicians, and providers of aging services with respect to the legal standard for incapacity, the guardianship process, and alternatives to guardianship. In recognition of the gift, the clinic will be renamed in honor of David Hickton's late mother, Gloria McDermott Hickton, and will be known as the Hickton Elder Law Clinic.

David Hickton graduated from Pitt Law in 1981 and served in a variety of capacities in the legal field before co-founding the firm of Burns, White & Hickton. Dawne Stepanski Hickton graduated from the law school in 1983 and began her career as a trial attorney at U.S. Steel. Since 2007, she has served as vice chair, president, and CEO of RTI International Metals, where she has worked since 1997. She was elected to the Pitt board of trustees in 2008.

"This gift will advance two of the primary goals that I identified for the law school from the very beginning of my deanship: strengthening and increasing our range of experiential learning programs, and furthering the law school’s already strong commitment to community service and access to justice," said Pitt Law School dean William M. Carter, Jr. "In clinical education — a field in which Pitt Law has been a leader for nearly two decades — students learn by doing. Law clinics provide hands-on training of law students in the competencies necessary to become successful legal professionals, while simultaneously providing direct legal service to underserved individuals."