In a conversation with Arthur Rothrock on The Litigator's Path, Young explains how she runs her six-person litigation firm on a scrum framework borrowed from software development, why she started representing cannabis companies two years before California's State Bar even cleared lawyers to do so, how AI drafting tools are letting her shed a W-2 associate without losing capacity, and what her business coach taught her to say during intake to head off collections problems 90 days later. The common thread: a litigation practice that stays small on purpose can still punch above its weight if it treats operations, technology, and client selection as seriously as briefing.
How Katy Young Runs a Litigation Firm on a Scrum Framework
Young's husband went to business school while she was in law school. After he became a scrum master in software, she read The Art of Scrum and started applying its structure to case management. The result is a twice-weekly, all-hands meeting where every attorney in the firm reports what they are working on, identifies who or what is blocking them, and moves each case to its next action item. Young describes it as "red ball, red ball received" – a handoff system that keeps every file touched by more than one person.
The meetings cost billable time. Young absorbs them as an administrative expense and never bills clients for the internal discussion. She frames it as a selling point during intake: the client's case gets talked through by the full firm twice a week at no charge. The approach also builds redundancy. Young recalls a period as a solo when she was too sick to physically get to a hearing in San Jose, pre-Zoom, with no one to cover. "I'm never going to put myself in this situation ever again," she told Rothrock. The scrum meetings guarantee that if any attorney is unavailable, someone else knows the file.
The firm currently operates with six people and is about to contract further as two partners depart – one to become a mediator, one to launch his own practice. Young says she is "really excited" to become the sole owner, in part because the leaner structure pairs well with the AI tools she has adopted over the past two years.
Why Katy Young Took Cannabis Clients Before the State Bar Allowed It
In 2015, a CPA friend called Young with a referral: a husband-and-wife consulting team in Oakland facing a $5 million demand letter. The catch was that the business helped clients file cannabis license applications. Young's only prior cannabis experience was unpaid work for a childhood friend who had become a grower in Oakland – breach of contract, employment disputes, a bad investment – none of it billed, all of it useful.
California did not designate cannabis as a lawful object of contract until 2017, when Civil Code Section 1550.5 created the exemption. The State Bar did not formally clear attorneys to advise cannabis clients on compliance with state law until 2017 or 2018. Young was filing suits two years before either development. "I was just crazy out there in 2015, 2016," she said. "Whatever. I'll sue him. Sure."
The consulting clients could not pay their growing bill, which reached $40,000 after Young resolved several matters for them. Their counteroffer was to take her to every cannabis industry event and introduce her to everyone they knew. That trade paid off. Through their trademark attorneys, Young met the founders of the National Cannabis Bar Association. Within a few years, she had joined the board, run for president, and built a referral pipeline that made cannabis litigation a core part of Ad Astra's practice. At one early conference in San Francisco, she watched a transactional attorney on a panel say she had no one to refer cannabis clients to when disputes arose. Young walked up to her immediately after the talk. They have been sending each other business for over a decade.
How AI Tools Are Replacing a Junior Associate at Ad Astra
Young's most junior W-2 associate, an eighth-year attorney, recently gave notice. She is not planning to hire a replacement. The reason is a combination of AI products that she says handle first-draft work at a fraction of what a second-year associate would cost.
The example she returns to is a motion for summary judgment. Young spent roughly two hours assembling eight pages of input – facts, legal authority, jury instructions, supporting documents – and fed it to Legion. The platform returned a 27-page, fully formatted motion. She then spent four-plus hours reviewing, cite-checking, and making the work her own. For a client on a fixed budget who had been asking for the motion but could not afford a $25,000 drafting bill, the workflow made the filing possible at all.
Young contrasted the result with Westlaw's CoCounsel, which she also tested with the same eight-page input. CoCounsel returned seven pages. She is locked into an annual Westlaw contract she considers overpriced and keeps CoCounsel access mainly for comparison.
Beyond drafting, Young uses Depo Copilot, which listens to depositions in real time, generates a running transcript, and suggests follow-up questions based on inconsistencies or ambiguous answers during breaks. She spent about eight hours loading the software with her deposition goals and exhibits before her first use, then found the real-time transcript and post-session insights valuable enough to plan immediate reuse. She also adopted Threadio for deposition summaries: the tool produces a page-line citation table with quotes and issue tags – work she estimates would otherwise take a full day – for $100 per transcript.
Her billing model has not changed. She still bills hourly. The efficiency gains translate into more cases handled at the same headcount, and smaller clients who previously could not justify litigation now have a path to representation. "I can make that money, whatever money they're willing to spend on litigation, stretch further with a suite of products," she said.
What Katy Young Learned About Juries by Sitting on One
Before she ever tried a case, Young sat on a jury. While waiting for her bar results in late 2009, she was called for service in San Francisco Superior Court and asked not to be dismissed. The case was a two-week asbestos trial – an elderly plaintiff with asbestosis, not mesothelioma, against a single remaining defendant after the others settled during jury selection.
The defense attorney's courtroom manner shaped Young's view of trial advocacy more than the evidence did. The attorney rolled her eyes, huffed audibly during objections, and was "a total jerk" toward the plaintiff's 90-year-old counsel from Brayton Purcell. When the jury deliberated, the group quickly agreed there was no liability – the plaintiff could not prove exposure to the specific defendant's asbestos. But the jurors disliked the defense attorney so intensely that they spent five additional hours trying to find a way to hold the defendant responsible. "Jurors are not really paying attention to the facts," Young said. "They're paying attention to you."
She carries that lesson into her current practice. For complex business or real estate disputes involving technical accounting or financial data, Young encourages clients to consider a bench trial. She tried a case involving the failed sale of a CPA firm and lucked into a jury pool loaded with accountant-types who had deferred service until after tax season. The educated panel returned a favorable verdict. But for the average case, she assumes the jury will decide on likability, not spreadsheets.
How Katy Young Handles Client Billing and Intake at a Small Firm
Collections remain what Young calls "the bane of any small law firm's existence." She has let clients slide on payment in the past, rationalizing that the next motion would produce a settlement, which would produce payment. A business coach has since changed her intake script.
Young now tells prospective clients, during the first conversation, that she will take a retainer as a security deposit, then send monthly invoices ranging from $2,500 to $25,000 for the next couple of years, with trial-month bills potentially reaching $50,000 to $75,000. Then she asks: "How are you going to feel when you get that invoice from me and it's a couple of years down the road and there doesn't appear to be a resolution in sight?" The goal is to create what her coach calls a "neural pathway" – emotional buy-in before the first bill arrives.
She also screens for resource disparity. If the opposing party can outspend her client, she flags it at intake rather than mid-litigation. And when Young determines she is on the wrong side of a dispute, she tells the client early and looks for an exit that is not trial. "I only represent the guy that I think I can win for," she said. The logic is partly ethical and partly commercial: a losing case means the client pays Young, then pays the other side, plus interest. "It's not good for business development."
Young requires her attorneys to bill six hours per day, which she estimates takes about eight hours of actual work – a deliberate contrast to the seven-and-a-half-hour billing expectations she encountered in big law, where the real workday stretched past ten hours. The lower target is part of a broader philosophy: she wants people working for her to be "happy and healthy," on the theory that miserable litigators produce worse results.
What Litigators Can Take Away
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Young runs twice-weekly all-hands meetings modeled on scrum sprints where every attorney reports their active cases, names blockers, and hands off next steps – she absorbs the cost as overhead and never bills it, but uses it as a client-facing selling point about firm-wide attention to every file.
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Before cannabis was a lawful object of contract in California in 2017, Young was already litigating breach of contract claims for cannabis businesses – the early risk built a referral network through the National Cannabis Bar Association that still feeds her pipeline a decade later.
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After her most junior associate gave notice, Young chose not to backfill with another hire; she uses AI drafting tools for first-pass motions and discovery, then spends attorney time on review and cite-checking, which let her produce a 27-page motion for summary judgment for a fixed-budget client who otherwise could not have afforded it.
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Young's business coach taught her to state the full financial reality of litigation at intake – monthly invoices up to $25,000 for years, with trial bills reaching $75,000 – and then ask the client how that will feel, creating emotional buy-in before the first bill arrives rather than chasing payment at the 90-day mark.
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She screens every new matter for resource disparity between the parties; if the other side can outspend her client, she says so during intake rather than discovering it mid-litigation when the client's budget is already exhausted.
Listen to the Full Episode
Katy Young's full conversation with Arthur Rothrock covers even more ground – from her two pit bulls named Drake and Nicki Minaj to her assessment of whether failing to use AI tools will soon constitute a competence violation under State Bar rules. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or stream it at legion.law. To learn more about Young's practice, visit astralegal.com or reach her at kyoung@astralegal.com.