Sign of the times.  At the AALL conference this week, I talked with an executive of a large legal publisher about the changing structure of the legal industry.  He observed that they are selling more and more products designed for law firm lawyers to in-house corporate legal departments.

The conclusion? This is a sign that corporations really are taking seriously their shift away from the old model of legal servcies delivery.  They are looking for areas where their in-house people can more efficiently and cheaply solve legal problems than their outside firms can.

This will require some adjustments by both publishers and by in-house counsel, as the players figure out how that legal work can be done more efficiently and effectively from the inside; it’s not just a matter of having different bodies doing the work, but doing the work differently.

This is pretty big news in the world of professional networking for legal professionals.  Legal OnRamp has built a name for itself as a leading example of a networking and collaboration platform for lawyers, but a lot of folks are still wondering where this web 2.0 thing is headed.

This deal adds a big stamp of legitimacy to Legal OnRamp’s efforts (not to mention an influx of cash in the form of an undisclosed investment), and it will also give the corporate lawyers that make up Corporate Executive Board’s General Counsel Roundtable a new collaboration platform.

A big key to this deal with be the extent to which CEB and Legal OnRamp are able to exploit connections with other fuctions that make up CEB’s client base.  Many of those functions are also the internal clients of Legal OnRamp’s current customer base.

See my earlier report, Legal OnRamp: Collaboration and the Future of Legal Content Creation, August 2008, and my colleague Louise Garnett’s look at CEB, Corporate Executive Board: Banking on Best Practices, March 17, 2008.