Scott Young was in the third grade when the school counselor asked him and other students to draw a picture of what they wanted to be when they grew up.
“I am the world’s worst artist,” Young says. “I drew a circle with two squiggly lines coming out of it, hoping it would look like a judge with a robe. She said I needed to become a lawyer before being a judge.”
Young is not a judge – at least not yet. He went to college and law school and is now one of the most respected corporate in-house lawyers in North Texas. As managing counsel for Toyota Motor North America, he is the automaker’s leading legal expert on commercial real estate development, lease negotiations and corporate transactions.
The University of Texas School of Law alum also has developed a well-earned reputation for pro bono and public service.
During the past several years, Young has performed hundreds and hundreds of hours of community service and pro bono efforts on projects focusing on veterans, Hurricane Harvey recovery, domestic violence shelters and legal assistance for low-income Texans.
The Texas Lawbook and the Association of Corporate Counsel’s DFW Chapter are pleased to announced that an independent panel of judges has named Young and Toyota Legal One as finalists for the 2018 Outstanding Corporate Counsel’s Pro Bono and Public Service Award.
Young and other finalists will be honored and the winners identified at an awards event on Thursday, Jan. 24, at the George W. Bush Institute.
“Scott’s efforts are amazing and tireless – all done while he balanced a busy work schedule and a family life with his wife and six children,” Toyota Managing Counsel Derek Lipscombe said in nominating Young for the award.
Young was born in Williamsburg, Va. His father was an engineer and he had no lawyers in his family.
“I had this romanticized idea of practicing international law, though I had no idea what that actually meant,” he says. “In law school, I realized quickly that litigation was not my calling.”
Young finished UT Law in 2004 and went to work in the real estate law section at Jenkens & Gilchrist. In 2006, he and a group of lawyers moved to Fulbright & Jaworski (now Norton Rose Fulbright).
In July 2011, officials at Dallas-based TGI Fridays came calling.
“They had hundreds and hundreds of locations around the country and they decided to restart their real estate development,” he says. “My favorite aspect about going in-house was doing deals cradle to grave and just being close to the business.”
In February 2017, Young discussed exploring a new challenge with his friend, Derek Lipscombe, who had left JCPenney a year earlier to join the legal department at Toyota.
“Derek was already drinking the Toyota Kool-Aid and said Toyota had just posted an opening that was right up my alley,” he says.
Within weeks, Young had taken his real estate law expertise to the world’s largest automaker, which had relocated its North American headquarters to Plano. He brought with him his passion for helping others.
“I was raised on the importance of giving back,” he says.
Young’s commitment to making this a better world started during his junior year at Utah State University, where he studied political science.
“Scott got the community service bug in 1999 when he researched prison recidivism rates in the State of Utah,” Lipscombe said in his nomination. “Scott documented the impact of higher education on recidivism and the corresponding fiscal impact to the state of reducing prison recidivism. He lobbied for, wrote a bill, obtained a legislative sponsor and secured funding to create the first electronic system of delivering higher education programs to incarcerated persons within the State of Utah.”
The initial program, Young says, was approved by the legislature and proved to be massively successful. The program was launched across the state in subsequent years.
“When you look at the cost of educating someone compared to the cost of warehousing people, it is a no-brainer,” he says.
In 2015, Young became involved with Mosaic Family Services, which operates a shelter for abused women and children and those seeking asylum.
“I’m a big believer in taking my kids with me for public service activities,” he says. “For example, we spent six hours at the shelter one day and my kids complained and bickered the whole drive there.”
Young says he was initially a bit disappointed when his kids didn’t do the work they had been assigned to do at the shelter and instead seemed to spend too much time playing with the children at the shelter.
“At the end of the day, however, one of the shelter’s workers came to me and pointed to one of the boys who had been playing with my son,” he says. “He told me that this was the first time in the 60 days the boy had been staying at the shelter that they had heard his voice. He said it was because my son took the time to play with the boy. It was a lesson for me, too, because my son had done exactly what he needed to do. He had made a difference in that boy’s life that day. ”
In the fall of 2017, Young took his two oldest kids to South Texas for a weekend to help victims of Hurricane Harvey.
“We cut sheetrock, removed an enormous amount of mold, chiseled linoleum off of floors – it was backbreaking work,” he says. “When the work day ended, we slept on the floor of a high school gym, woke up and started it all over again the next day. Not only did we help so many others in their time of need, it brought us closer as a family and was an experience that my kids will never forget.”
Young is involved in several more public service projects, including assisting military veterans and their families and volunteering at a law magnet school, but he is especially proud of his work as chair and member of the Pro Bono and Community Outreach Committees of the Association of Corporate Counsel’s DFW Chapter for the past seven years.
Lawyers in corporate legal departments, he says, face different challenges in doing pro bono than attorneys at law firms. To help address those issues, Young and Toyota hosted an ACC-DFW Pro Bono Fair at Toyota’s spacious new offices off the North Dallas Tollway. Norton Rose Fulbright sponsored the event.
“Some in-house counsel are able to do a limited amount of pro bono each month, but are not able to tackle a long, time-consuming case,” Young says. “Other in-house counsel moved to Texas with their companies from another state and are not licensed to practice law in Texas. So, they need to team up with local lawyers on a project.”
Young and others say that the ACC-DFW Pro Bono Fair allows in-house counsel to learn about opportunities that are within the lawyer’s limitations or abilities. But the ACC’s interest in doing pro bono can have an additional benefit for the non-profit organizations: attract more outside lawyers to volunteer to do more work.
“Nothing gets the attention of a lawyer at a law firm more than telling them they will get to work side-by-side on a pro bono project with a lawyer from Toyota or another company,” Young says. “It is a great motivating factor because we know outside lawyers will be more likely to take on a case if they know that they get to spend time with an ACC member.”
Editor’s Note: Scott Young is serving as president of the ACC-DFW Chapter. He did not, however, participate in the judging of the 2018 Outstanding Corporate Counsel Award categories.