Another thought here...

you can "cast" a column to a particular collation at select time.

For Example

Select distinct LastName COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS

From testtable

If you had a case sensitive column, you can use the COLLATE clause to force the collation you want at run-time without schema changes.

There may be some gotchas that I don't know about with this method.