Lawyering on the Beach (Or on a Tractor): What I Learned by Attending LOTB Conference 2026
This past April, I traded my rural Shelbyville, Illinois office for a stretch of Mexican coastline and joined with several other lawyers at the Lawyers on the Beach (“LOTB”) Retreat in Cancun. Before you write it off as a boondoggle, let me explain the premise—because it turned out to be some of the most useful continuing education I’ve had in years.
Being a “Lawyer on the Beach” isn’t really about the beach at all. It’s a state of mind—the belief that the practice of law can support the life you want, wherever that life happens to be. The organizers like to ask, “What is your beach?” For me, my beach is just as often on my small farm, at a goat show, or a quiet cabin as it is actual sand. For many of you in the Agricultural Law Section, I suspect your beach looks like a barn, a gravel road, or the kitchen table of a farmhouse. Wherever it is, the freedom to practice from there is worth building toward—and that freedom rests on good systems, sound processes, and, more and more, technology.
Nearly every session in Cancun circled back to one subject: artificial intelligence. Here is what I brought home.
AI isn’t coming—it’s already here
The most freeing thing I heard all week was that we are past the point of “choosing” AI. There is no opt-out button. Clients are already finding lawyers through AI tools, and the marketing experts on hand—like Colleen Young of Get Staffed Up—stressed that search engine optimization now has a sibling: “AI optimization.” Long-form, genuinely helpful content and a clear message about who you are and what you do matter more than ever. Ask yourself who the authority in your niche will be in five years. In agricultural law, where deep subject-matter credibility is everything, that question tends to answer itself.
Protect your clients (and your license)
For lawyers, the ethics piece cannot be an afterthought. A few practical takeaways: use paid, professional versions of AI tools and turn model training off. I discovered mine was already off because I pay for the professional tiers. Know your privacy settings and revisit the terms periodically, admittedly overwhelming advice even for those of us who draft privacy terms for a living. And put it in writing. At Rincker Law we are revising our retainers to include informed consent for our own use of AI, and we are weighing a separate, conspicuous addendum warning clients that their own careless use of AI could waive the attorney–client privilege.
A tool, not a toy—which means prompting is the skill
“Junk in, junk out.” The real power of these tools lives in the prompt and the information you feed them. Two lawyers can ask the same question and get wildly different results; this is no glorified Google search. Prompt engineering is a genuine, learnable skill, and I’d love to see bar associations teach it. The shortcut is specificity—tell the tool your role, your preferred tone, your learning style, and the output format you want.
Kristen David of Upleveling Your Business described three levels of AI: (1) simple question-and-answer, (2) automations, and (3) AI agents—and she insists you master Level 1 before climbing. I’ll be honest: I’m still a Level 1 beginner, using AI for job descriptions, brainstorming, and speaker introductions. And that’s okay. Like learning the Rules of Evidence, this education comes in layers, over time. One caution the room agreed on: an AI license is not an employee perk. It is a powerful tool that requires real training before you hand it to your team, and only firm-approved, paid versions should ever touch client information.
Get organized first
My biggest personal breakthrough was mundane but transformative: organization. I built a firm-wide “AI knowledge base”—a master document describing our mission, brand voice, client profiles, services, and team—so the tool actually understands who we are. A tip I wish I’d known sooner: you can tell it to wait until you finish uploading everything before it analyzes, then ask for a tidy summary. I also gave my projects a uniform numbering system that mirrors our practice areas and our task-management software, with private spaces my team can’t see and shared ones they can. Don’t assume the tool remembers anything, though—each new project needs its own information uploaded.
The real game-changer: Skills and agents
The moment it clicked was watching a colleague use “Skills” in an AI agent to finish, over a single lunch, a file-renaming cleanup project she’d been chasing for months. Agents can be taught repeatable workflows—scanning and renaming documents, moving them to the right folder, drafting routine correspondence—and I now expect a market where firms buy and sell ready-made legal Skills the way we once bought form books. For solo and small ag-law practices without a big support staff, this is the closest thing to hiring help that I’ve seen.
Freedom builds value
Victoria Collier of Quid Pro Quo drove home a point that should resonate in this Section: roughly 34% of lawyers are 56 or older. Many of us will eventually sell or transition our practices—just as our farming clients wrestle with succession. The lesson is the same on both sides of that table. A practice built on documented systems, playbooks, and low overhead is worth far more than one that lives entirely in the owner’s head. The more enslaved you are to your practice, the less valuable it is to a buyer—and the less it resembles a “beach” of any kind.
A little passive income, too
Finally, Sonia Lakhany of 4L reminded us that the expertise we already have can become templates, e-books, or courses. Do your market research first, and consider housing that revenue in a separate brand and entity.
Back to the beach
The biggest shift for me wasn’t any single app—it was mindset. AI will not replace lawyers; if anything, our clients will need our human discernment and judgment more than ever. But the lawyers who thrive will be the ones who use these tools to build a practice flexible enough to run from a beach, a tractor, or a secluded cabin. That is a goal worth chasing—whatever your beach looks like.
I have no financial relationship with Lawyers on the Beach and am not part of any affiliate program. If you’d like to attend next year, it will be held May 3–7, 2027; you can learn more at legallypinktravel.net/lotb2027. I cannot recommend it more highly. I’m no tech guru, so if you have advanced questions, please consult one—I’m happy to share referrals to my resources.
Cari B. Rincker
Licensed in IL, NY, NJ, CT, TX, KY & DC
Founder, Rincker Law, PLLC
cari@rinckerlaw.com • www.rinckerlaw.com • Call/Text (217) 531-2179
This article was originally published in Agricultural Law (July 2026, Vol. 36, No. 1), the newsletter of ISBA’s Section on Agricultural Law.