Does your law office have any ambitions to grow?
Not exponentially, at least in terms of staff. I don't expect us to top 20 bodies at any time during the useful life of this hardware. But I do expect more and more courts to go the way of the federal system with PACER/ECF. In fact, one of our local jurisdictions is already e-Filing. And we are increasingly able to get, say, squad car video in digital formats. So I do expect our data volume to increase at a rapid clip. We're at ~100 GB now; I don't want anything less than 2 TB of storage room.
3. Legal documents are written using serious software, not trivial web apps. They have numerous technical requirements and typographical conventions that must be strictly adhered to, in some cases to the point where courts will specify the precise font you must use for all submissions, for example. You don't write this sort of thing in Google Docs, where the concept of a cross-reference has yet to appear and the numbering styles available are one small step past "numbered" and "not numbered".
This!
We have fifteen years worth of investment in carefully styled MS Word documents. Format matters, not just for courts, but for clients who expect a certain level of professionalism and consistency. Telling a client, "Yeah it looks all funny because we decided to start using iGoogleBook's TweetDocs and haven't got it all figured out yet," does not inspire confidence. Also, our best typists are 80 wpm and/or using keyboard shortcuts as a matter of spinal reflex. Cloud document services just aren't there yet.
The moon is made of green cheese. -- John Heywood