Wolters Kluwer
2025
Phase 4: Advance Template Customization
A self-service system for clients to build custom questionnaire templates without breaking the platform’s
Overview
Letting Clients Customize Without Breaking Standardization
A self-service template builder that lets clients create and reuse their own questionnaires, without breaking the standardized comparison the platform depends on.
Problem
Standardization Made Comparison Work. It Also Created a Gap.
LegalCollaborator shipped with a fixed set of default templates, which is exactly what makes side-by-side firm comparison possible. But niche practice areas (insurance claims, class action, jurisdiction-specific work) needed different questions than the defaults allowed, and every new matter meant rebuilding the same custom questions from scratch.
The design tension: How do you let a client build a template that feels genuinely theirs, while preserving enough structure that comparison and AI scoring don't break? Total freedom breaks the platform. Zero freedom doesn't solve the pain.
Why it mattered:
Cost avoidance: clients stop paying for custom builds, and Wolters Kluwer stops hand-building templates.
Competitive parity: the closest competitor already allowed unlimited custom questions.
Platform expansion: a path beyond RFP workflows into everyday legal-department work.
Better signal: Persuit's research found clients pick the lowest price only 49% of the time, so content, staffing, and expertise have to be comparable to be usable.
Research
Testing With the Teams Closest to Client Friction
Internal moderated testing across two prototypes (customizing and saving templates, managing templates), with six SMEs across Product Strategy, Training, and Product Management, chosen because they sit closest to client friction. We tested three things: how easily users could tailor a questionnaire, how intuitive saving it as a reusable template felt, and how easy ongoing management was.
What worked:
Defaulting to the last-used tab.
A clear template count with usage limits that built trust.
What didn't:
"Default" vs. "Custom" terminology read as unclear and concerning.
No way to preview a template before committing.
Users assumed permission controls existed when there weren't any.
Ideation
Extending the Design System Instead of Breaking It
The existing design system covered standard form inputs, but this feature needed question types beyond the component library. Building the template builder meant designing custom question-type components that extended the system rather than breaking from it. Checkbox (multi-select), dropdown menu, an expanded file-attachment type with standard Microsoft formats, and numerical value, each built on existing tokens and structure.
This made it a design-system problem, not just a UI problem. Every new pattern had to stay consistent with the existing system while keeping the builder flexible enough to make questionnaires genuinely comparable. Every custom question still mapped to the standardized criteria model, so comparison and AI scoring kept working.
Designs
Where's the Undo" to a Clear, Confident Builder
What didn't work in testing: The slider for section actions read as non-interactive, drag handles for reordering sat in an unexpected spot, deleting a section had no undo, and the save flow (radio buttons disappearing into a new dialog) broke users' mental model.
What changed in the iterated concept: Renamed "Default/Custom" to "Wolters Kluwer Templates" and "Company Templates", replaced the slider with always-visible section actions, repositioned drag handles, added stronger irreversible-action cues, clarified field labels, expanded file-attachment support, and changed "Done" to "Next" to match when the task actually completed.
Scoped for a future release: Role-based access controls, full template preview before saving, default answers and multi-select question types, and template usage analytics
