Sparks Family Law, Inc.

I hired Gary when I was pregnant and had been served with a paternity action from my son’s father. I needed to transfer the case from a different county to Contra Costa. At first Gary was helpful and competent but ultimately he really let me down in many ways. He failed to request that childcare expenses be shared when requesting child support so I had to request this after the fact (an error which ended up costing me almost $ 9k.) When I approached him about filing a motion to get childcare costs shared I got no response. I emailed him several times asking if he was still my lawyer and he did not respond. I did not get a full response from him until after I’d retained another attorney, almost 2 months later. She had to hound him to get the copies of his file and threaten to report him to the State Bar Association just to get copies of my file, which I believe it took him over two weeks to deliver. She said she’d never had that happen before. Along those lines, I personally found him to be quite disorganized and unresponsive by phone and email.
As far as billing… watch out! His contract says he will bill monthly but I only once received a statement from him. When I asked him to send me the remainder of my account he replied saying that I owed him money. Apparently for 8 months he’d been accruing charges that he did not tell me about and never showed up in his online billing portal. Mysteriously, when I dropped him as an attorney these charges appeared out of nowhere despite the fact that I hadn’t received a bill in 8 months. So much time has passed that I wasn’t able to verify with phone records that they were valid charges but they did not seem legit to me.
One thing I’ve found when I was looking to replace Mr. Sparks was his reputation among other lawyers. Based on the attorneys I talked to the consensus was that he is unresponsive and disorganized. I was lucky in that the only litigation I had was with a judge in another county who isn’t familiar with his reputation. I would not want him as my counsel in front of a Contra Costa judge.
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UPDATE ²⁄₂₀ — Gary’s response below really pushes the boundaries re: attorney/​client privilege. Unilocalers — think seriously about whether you want to pick a lawyer who crosses this line ethically.
Gary, the ABA recommends the following if you don’t agree with a client’s review online: «A lawyer’s duty to keep client confidences has few exceptions and in an abundance of caution I do not feel at liberty to respond in a point-​by-​point fashion in this forum. Suffice it to say that I do not believe that the post presents a fair and accurate picture of the events.» They do NOT recommend slamming a client online and going into details of the case, or calling her names! You would be SO much better served if you spent your time actually responding to your clients’ phone calls and emails rather than slamming ex-​clients on message boards. Since you don’t seem to understand what the best practices are around disclosing confidential information about clients on public message boards, I’ve provided links for you below.
Women reading this take note: Gary degrades me here as «needy.“If you want an attorney who will call you such a name when you’re going through family court, then by all means, hire this guy.
Lastly, what Gary writes below is untrue. I was never «furious» with him for not writing me back around Christmas. The guy went dark and didn’t respond to two phone calls and several emails. I finally emailed him asking if he was still representing me and didn’t hear back, so I had to hire another lawyer (at great expense to me.) Only after I called his paralegal letting her know I’d retained another lawyer did Gary finally respond.

I have been using Gary Sparks since 2009 before he opened his own practice and I can say hands down that he has been a great family attorney and counselor for all of my initial and continuing divorce and custody needs.
I would recommend Gary hands down on any family legal issues as he is hard working, practical, caring, and smart as a whip.
Sincerely
Aaron Reid