Clerk's Office

Robert P. Duckworth (Bob) has been the elected Clerk of the Circuit Court for Anne Arundel County since 1994. He is in his fourth term and the County's forty-first Clerk since this office was established in 1650.

During his time as Clerk, Bob also served as president of the Maryland Circuit Court Clerks' Association. He was the first chairman to serve on the State Judiciary's Conference of Circuit Court Clerks.　 Before being elected Clerk, Bob was Chief Deputy Clerk under the former Clerk and in 1990 a candidate for Congress. In the past, he worked on Capital Hill, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Office of Management and Budget.

Bob lead the effort to computerize the operations of the Clerk's Office and was a key part of the team responsible for rebuilding the nationally acclaimed historic Anne Arundel County Courthouse on Church Circle. He also played a key role in creating a statewide court professional development certificate program and salary compensation system for Maryland's court employees. He is an active certified instructor for the Institute for Court Management under the National Center for State Courts and has also worked with the State Judiciary on the Access to Justice Commission. He has an annual operating budget of $5 million and a clerk staff of some 120 employees. He is currently active within the development process of the new Maryland Electronic Courts system, which will introduce electronic filing and case management to the Judiciary.

As Clerk, Bob manages the collection of some $80 million in public revenues through recording fees from more than a hundred thousand deeds and filing fees from 7,500 civil cases each year. This accounts for about 6 percent of the revenues generated for the annual county budget. However Bob's proudest Clerk achievement has been the smooth processing of some 300 adoption cases a year, performing approximately 7,000 civil marriage ceremonies and collecting some $50,000 for local charities in his Clerk Office’s Casual-for-a-Cause initiative.

Born in Philadelphia, Bob Duckworth has been a Marylander most of his life. An active resident of Crofton, Maryland for more than 30 years, he has served as president of the Crofton Civic Association and was honored as a distinguished Kiwanian. Bob has also served on boards for the Anne Arundel County YMCA and Bowie Health Center. He is a veteran of the 82nd Airborne and a political science graduate of the Catholic University of America. Married to his wife Annette for more than 35 years, Bob has two children, Rob, an architect, and Karen, a family practice physician.