local user accounts or mobile/ad accounts?

Local is easiest, but least capable. Mobile brings more functionality such as SSO (if your intranet sites support it), and of course the ability to have passwords managed by a directory can be very handy (and is required by some security policies, to enforce password complexity/expiration). Managing access to network resources through AD is also a plus.

If security is not a strong requirement and Identity Management is not important, local accounts may be the right choice. Much lower complexity.

There may be some macs that need to be bound to AD for this complexity, in changing departments, and with comes access to different servers or printers.

but most of that may be solved through self service

I'm at a school district and we use all AD accounts. If needed, you can add a policy to Self Service to cache credentials locally and make the users admins, especially if they take their Macs home. You can scope what users see in Self Service by AD credentials. The real advantage to Casper is setting up scoping by subnet or location, and sending out automated updates or installs without user interaction. But, either through automation or user management, the Casper Suite will allow you to work smarter instead of harder. ;)

Mike - does it make a difference if theyre local or AD in the sense of scoping or installs?

For example, if they take their macs with them...connect to our vpn and access our self service options there or we can push stuff via vpn (probably not the most ideal) but is that workable?

For Self Service scoping, it has to be an AD account or an account on the JSS.

That said, they can log in with a local account and use their AD account for Self Service and that works fine, it absolutely does not matter what account is logged into the system, just who logs into Self Service.