Is there a way to automatically scale footage to vertical?

You could scale up your clip then copy and paste the Motion properties onto all of your other clips of the same specs. Even make a preset to use those same Scale settings in the future. Granted you still need to probably adjust the position of the clips after that to better compose them. Auto Reframe is a feature you can also look into using that will somewhat automate the process of creating a new sequence with a different frame size, but I tend to go about it manually.