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.

Here’s a nifty little piece from Harvard Business Publishing’s The Big Shift: Abandon Stocks, Embrace Flows.  It paints a broad picture of a world in which ownership of stocks of knowledge are becoming relatively less valuable than participation in flows of new, tacit knowledge.  This is true for individuals and companies.

Now transfer the idea to information markets such as legal publishing. Value in the traditional legal publishing world was based on stores of retrospective information – collections of primary law documents such as court decision and statutes; secondary work such as treatises and encyclopedias; journals; practice guides.  To be sure, there’s always been a “flow” component to legal publishing – Shepard’s and other citator products tell us when the validity of a legal source has changed, for example, and the ubiquitous loose-leaf service was the print world’s way of trying to keep up with the flow of new information – but the value publishers provided was the in the archives of information, knowledge, and analysis that publishers produced and that lawyers incorporated into their practices.

Today, all the newest information tools for lawyers are all about the flow – not so much about how I search and retrieve what’s needed from existing stocks of knowledge, but how I position myself to not miss the new knowledge contained in the rapid flow of ideas around me.  Blogs, RSS, Twitter, are all about positioning myself in the stream of information I care about in order to not miss anything. Today’s wider array of workflow tools available to legal, tax and compliance professionals are all about dropping exactly the right piece of up-to-date information into my hands just as I need it – pulling it out of the flow.  The value is increasingly tied to the timing and the currency of the knowledge, not just its availability or even quality.

In many parts of the information industries we are moving from a search-and-retrieve model to a publish-and-subscribe model.  Note that search-and-retrieve works well when the value is in “stocks” of knowledge, but that publish-and-subscribe makes more sense when the pace of change means the greater value lies in just knowing what’s changing.  Note, too, that publish-and-subscribe means the information consumer is both consumer and contributor.  As this piece notes,

We can’t participate effectively in flows of knowledge–at least not for long–without contributing knowledge of our own. This occurs because participants in these knowledge flows don’t want free riding “takers”; they want to develop relationships with people and institutions that can contribute knowledge of their own. This is a huge hurdle for most executives who were trained to guard their knowledge carefully. Yet if they remain “takers” they will find themselves rapidly marginalized. Knowledge flows tend to concentrate among participants who are sharing with, and learning from, each other.

Twitter offers a perfect example of this; its value increases exponentially when networks of people use it to not just share information but to solicit and provide expertise, and to leverage that sharing across a network. The loose collection of products, platforms and tools we call social media are a response to this increasing tendency of knowledge workers to value the flow of information and tacit knowledge relative to stocks of knowledge. Information products that capture and allow participation in those knowledge flows have become more valuable than archival information products.

In my recent Outsell report, Professional Networks and Social Publishing in the Legal, Tax & Regulatory Information Segment, I tried to cast a pretty wide net in my analysis of all the many ways that legal professionals can use professional networks and social media. The report covers not a single type of network or tool, but rather an array of tools that are at the disposal of lawyers today, including the services we know as professional networks (LinkedIn, for example), but also various kinds of knowledge-sharing sites, expert networks, and crowdsourcing services.

In trying to make sense of this all, the report outlines a three-tier model for lawyers’ use of the various services available.  Each of the three tiers meets some but not all of the needs a lawyer might have: for basic networking, for content delivery/marketing, and for service delivery.  Each tier also presents opportunities for legal publishers and information providers to participate in the networking world.

That last point is key; many publishers (not just in law, but other fields) assume they need to own or control a network to benefit from the networked environment. My view is that the way for publishers to work with networks is to make their content more interoperable and portable, and thereby more visible on all the networks available, rather than betting on any single network or platform. Network participants are putting out their own content; if everyone is a publisher, where does that leave publishers who keep their content locked inside old containers and inside walled gardens?