Allen N. Trask, III is a versatile, strategic advisor and counselor at Ward and Smith, P.A., equally at home in the courtroom, working alongside business owners to define their goals and chart a path to achieve them, or helping someone who is not yet certain they have a legal need figure out the right next step. He leads the firm’s Agribusiness Practice Group and co-leads its Insurance Counseling & Recovery and Hemp and Cannabis Law Practice Groups. He sits on the advisory board for Ward and Smith Business Consulting.

A native of Southeastern North Carolina with family farming roots, Allen has built a practice that is as varied as the clients he serves, from small business owners and landlords to farmers, developers, and entrepreneurs navigating emerging markets. Rather than define a lane and stay in it, he has always followed clients where they have led him, embracing the evolution that comes with that approach rather than resisting it. What clients share is less a common industry than a common need: someone they can call first, who will help them think through a situation clearly and ride the wave with them, whether it turns out to be a legal problem or not. That trusted advisor role is where Allen does his best work, and it has drawn him, organically, into practice areas as different as agribusiness, insurance counseling, community associations, and hemp and cannabis law.

Working with North Carolina real estate developers and the community associations that they create was where Allen found his professional footing. He continues to handle a wide range of issues for these clients, including the preparation, amendment, interpretation, and enforcement of restrictive covenants and governing corporate documents, declarant control transition and disputes, fiduciary concerns, and collections. Allen’s representation of community associations in disaster recovery cases gave rise to his interest in the insurance space, which he actively leverages for the firm’s clients. His work with real estate developers goes beyond just their relationship with community associations and embraces both land use and zoning matters and commercial leasing and property management concerns.

Allen also devotes a significant portion of his time to the firm’s diverse base of Agribusiness clients, which include farming and timber operations, crop storage facilities, equipment and inputs suppliers, and agritourism ventures. He coordinates the firm’s resources to address the specialized issues facing these clients, such as bona fide farm designations, farmland leases, crop insurance, corporate organization and succession planning, equipment financing and leasing, environmental concerns, and regulatory compliance and permitting. His Southeastern NC roots are not merely background; they inform how he understands the pressures, the rhythms, and the stakes of agricultural life, and they have made him a trusted resource for farming families and agribusiness operators across the region.

In 2015, partially as an outgrowth of the firm’s Agribusiness practice, Allen and his colleagues began working with clients in the hemp space, earlier than nearly any law firm in North Carolina. They have tracked every significant shift in the regulatory landscape since, from the state’s pilot program through the 2018 Farm Bill and into the current — and still evolving — federal and state framework. That decade of continuous involvement means clients are not simply getting legal advice; they are getting guidance from someone who has watched this industry develop in real time and understands where it has been as well as where it is going. Allen currently helps guide the firm’s Hemp and Cannabis Law practice across North Carolina and beyond, representing growers, processors, retailers, and those who do business adjacent to the plant.

Outside the office, Allen is an active member of the Wilmington community. He serves on the Advisory Board of the Cape Fear Museum of History and Science, is a Leadership Wilmington alumnus, and is a past president of the New Hanover County Bar Association. For nearly a decade, he also served the firm as co-Geographic Team Leader for the Wilmington office and as co-leader of the Community Associations Practice Group, roles that deepened both his understanding of the local market and his commitment to it. He and his family call Wilmington home.