Inexpensive Masters of Legal studies

It's different by a narrow set of criteria, but it's not innovative. Since LLMs and bachelor of law degrees don't lead to licensure to practice, that's the reason why no one cares about them being offered online.
It's not like they're going to be made to take bar exams to show outcomes. There are already California-eligible correspondence programs. In my opinion, that would be more of an apples to apples comparison.

 

But the LLM does, in many cases, lead to licensure to practice. Suppose you earned a professional law degree in another country. Your degree may be perfectly valid in that country, but it won't be an ABA-approved JD degree, and will not qualify for the bar in many US states.

However, a lot of states will accept foreign law degrees for licensure, if they are supplemented by an LLM in US law from an ABA law school. And many US law schools serve that market. For example, Washington University in St. Louis offers an LLM as follows:

People get this degree specifically for US licensure. And it is available in a fully online format:

 

One reason that change is so slow in the legal field is that so many parties are involved, including (1) the law schools themselves, (2) the ABA, and (3) the individual state bars. Each of the three can effectively veto, or at least restrict, the effects of a proposed change if they aren't comfortable with it.

So in California, for example, the state bar is OK with DL law schools. But the ABA isn't OK with it, so CA DL law degrees have little to no value out of state. And since the ABA isn't OK with it, the only California law schools that offer DL degrees are ones that lack ABA approval.

At the present time, it appears that many ABA-approved law schools (which are currently facing horrendous declines in traditional JD enrollment) are prepared to adopt new approaches to attract students. The introduction of a bar-qualifying LLM degree by DL is one example. The introduction of an undergraduate BA in Law is another. And note that both of these changes were implemented by highly ranked law schools (WUSTL and Arizona respectively).

If law schools are ready to implement change, that doesn't necessarily mean that the ABA or the state boards will immediately follow (as you point out, they may in fact resist those changes). But the fact that the law schools are ready to implement change is still progress.

 

My state will consider foreign law degrees, but it will not accept correspondence degrees.

I wouldn't exactly call Arizona highly ranked. #40 is far away from the prized T14. The ABA not accrediting LLM or bachelors degrees is even more reason for them not to care.

 

There are currently 202 ABA-accredited JD-granting law schools (including provisionally accredited schools). It's true that the "T14" gets special consideration. But that's less than 7 % of the total.

WUSTL (currently #18 USN&WR) is ranked in the top 10% of ABA law schools.
Arizona (currently #40 USN&WR) is ranked in the top 20% of ABA law schools.

So these schools are ranked higher than 80-90% of peer institutions. If you aren't comfortable calling that "highly ranked", then substitute "ranked well above average" or "Top 20%" instead. The only point that I'm trying to make is that these schools are very respectable by ABA law school standards.