Ex-lawyer seeks reinstatement to MD bar after U.S. House primary win

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Robin Ficker, the perennial candidate, citizen activist, real estate broker, sports heckler and former attorney who last week won the Republican nomination for Maryland’s 6th Congressional District, is seeking to be readmitted to the state bar.

Ficker, 83, filed his petition for reinstatement the with Maryland Supreme Court on Wednesday, hours after the Associated Press declared him the winner of the Republican primary race.

The former solo practitioner was disbarred in 2022 for failing to appear at a 2019 district court trial, though Maryland’s highest court noted that the penalty also stemmed from his being disciplined by the state and federal bars eight times for professional misconduct.

“He has thoroughly learned from those mistakes,” Ficker’s attorney, William C. Brennan Jr., wrote in his petition for reinstatement. The petition promises that Ficker “will purchase case management software to ensure that all court dates are correctly entered on his calendar and that he will not be overbooked for court appearances.”

Ficker’s campaign did not immediately return a request for comment Tuesday.

Thomas J. Stolz, a fellow Montgomery County attorney and Republican candidate, wrote in a character letter that his colleague “is a man of great energy and enthusiasm,” which “occasionally led him to take on a great many tasks at once.”

“I believe that his only lapse of judgment was wanted to do too much for too many,” Stolz wrote.

Ficker’s petition also notes his primary win, saying he “has remained active in the Maryland political community and has contributed to the betterment of society.”

With provisional ballots and some mail-in ballots left to be counted as of Tuesday, Ficker had received almost 42% of the Republican vote in the three-way race to face incumbent Democratic U.S. Rep. April McClain Delaney. The petition also called Ficker “one of Maryland’s foremost citizen activists,” saying he’s authored over a dozen charter amendments for Montgomery County, including one expected to appear on the ballot this November.

A fan of the Washington Wizards and the University of Maryland’s wrestling team, Ficker has been known for his appearances in courtside seats and getting under opposing players’ skin. A Republican since Gerald Ford’s presidency, Ficker served one term as a state delegate from 1979 to 1983.

Ficker has run for various state and local offices over the past several decades, making bids for the Republican nominations in the 2022 gubernatorial primary and 2024 race for U.S senate. In the 2026 race, he’s sought to win Western Maryland’s congressional seat on a platform of cutting the national deficit, bringing jobs to the area and delivering a majority for President Donald Trump in the House of Representatives, calling himself a “fiscal hawk” and a “day-one Trump supporter.”

His petition states that the state’s bar counsel had advised him of “several unresolved complaints” at the time of his disbarment that he believed he had “satisfactorily responded to” as of this March. It does not state what those complaints are. Bar counsel had not filed a response to Ficker’s petition as of Tuesday afternoon.

When he was disbarred in 2022, the then-Maryland Court of Appeals wrote in its opinion that since 1990, three generations of bar counsel had brought charges against Ficker for “failures to appear in court on dates scheduled for his clients’ trials, failures to adequately prepare for his
clients’ cases, failures to supervise the lawyers whom he employed to work on his clients’ cases, lack of candor to the court, and, in one instance, failure to safeguard client property.”

The final set of charges was brought after Ficker failed to appear at a Prince George’s County courthouse for a client’s trial, after his assistant filed a last-minute continuance motion that said a prosecutor who no longer worked at the state’s attorney’s office consented to postponing the case.