From a general perspective, and I know purists will disagree simply because of the memory grants (which will affect OTHER queries), no, it shouldn't cause you issues directly. Not unless there's something afterwards which needs to work against these as a where clause and wants to treat them as LOBs or something else oddball goes on under the hood.

They're just strings. The MAX just tells it to prepare for off-page storage. In this case, with everything under 50 chars, your rows should stay in-line so that shouldn't be a concern.

Now, is it best practice? Of course not. You're setting it up to include word documents in every column of every row. SQL Server has absolutely no chance in hell of properly optimizing based on data expectations. Indexing one of those for later use in the query would be a curious endeavour (I forget if you can even straight index a MAX column, I'll have to check again). So, no, that's a bad idea if you're coding it from scratch. Is it worth a code roll to change when inherited? Well, that depends on how bad current performance is.