It had been just a week and half since Austin attorney Julie Sparks and staff came back to their law office from the COVID-19 shutdown, when a fire in the early hours Thursday caused $200,000 in damage. Now Sparks, the founding attorney of immigration firm J. Sparks Law, is scrambling to get all of her client files out of the building, which sustained $150,000 of damage to the structure and $50,000 to the contents. The Austin Fire Department reported on Twitter that the fire started from homeless people improperly discarding "smoking material" in a crawl space under the office, which is located in a converted house in downtown Austin. It happened around 4 a.m. June 18, and no one was there, Sparks said. A fire department video showed smoke billowing from under the office.

Although one fire department tweet said the fire started in a "homeless camp" in a crawl space under the building, Sparks said her landlord padlocked the crawl space door and she's never seen people coming or going. "There's a big problem with homeless individuals in this area. Somehow, that lock was compromised. I don't know when it happened," she noted, explaining that in the past three years she's had to call police five times on homeless people who did things such as entering the office while appearing drunk. |

Saving client files

The fire department had to hack through the floors of three of the offices to gain entry to the crawl space and put out the fire, she noted. Her paralegal's office was badly burned and all of the client files that she was currently handling were lost, she said. "The loss was very, very minimal," Sparks added. "I would say less than 1% of all of our files were in there." She noted that she has already filed an insurance claim. The office is boarded up now, and by the end of Friday, all of her firm's property will be out of the building and sent to a facility for treatment for extensive smoke damage. "I'm in a huge rush to get my files out of there because when the building is boarded up like that, it's usually vandalized," she said. After handling the crisis of saving her files, Sparks said she would turn her attention to finding a temporary office or moving offices altogether. Like many people in the whole nation during the COVID-19 shutdown, Sparks and her staff had been working from home for months. "We had all returned to the office a week and a half ago," said Sparks. "Because of COVID-19---my staff is amazing---they were doing a great job of working from home already, so we were able to easily kick it back into gear and work from home. We'll get through it."