I may be influenced by the fact that my firm's two offices are in New Orleans and Pensacola, two highly hurricane-prone areas. As a result of hurricanes, disaster preparedness has been etched into the firm's thinking (as well as my own - I was a software engineer during Katrina and worked on moving services to the cloud during that time - I am now a lawyer).

Anyway, why not go to the cloud? Something like Jungle Disk would replace a shared disk. There are also products more focused on legal work, such as Netdocuments. Of course, cost is always an issue, but Jungle Disk is relatively cheap.

As a plus, cloud systems let the attorneys work from home without needing a VPN client.

Although it might worry you, it's been going on for quite a long time.

The government granted / sold middle america to settling european immigrants. The government auctions land in the gulf of mexico to oil companies, then distributes part of the money to the states around the gulf. Also, the government grants limited monopolies to creators of works (copyright law) and inventors of useful works (patents).

We gave certain authority to the government when we adopted the constitution.