Case Study — Thomson Reuters
Thomson Reuters Elite
UX Leadership for Enterprise Legal & Financial Platforms. A multi-year engagement as UX lead across Thomson Reuters Elite's practice management suite — including 3E Workspace, ProLaw, and Legal Tracker — modernizing legacy workflows, rescuing a stalled business intelligence initiative, and setting the design direction for 10 products used by the world's largest law firms and financial institutions.
A legacy platform, a stalled migration, and a BI project that wouldn't ship
Thomson Reuters Elite's practice management suite ran the financial and operational backbone for hundreds of the world's largest law firms — but its flagship legacy product was aging, and the path forward, 3E Workspace, was struggling to earn customer trust. Firms were wary of migrating mission-critical billing, trust accounting, and matter management workflows onto a new platform, and conversion had stalled well below where the business needed it.
Compounding the problem, a business intelligence initiative meant to give firm leadership real-time visibility into performance had failed to ship four separate times across multiple attempts. Each restart eroded stakeholder confidence further, while ten different products across the Elite portfolio pulled in inconsistent design directions with no shared UX strategy tying them together.
Design leadership across the entire portfolio
Leading UX across all 10 Elite products meant treating the legacy-to-3E migration not as a technical cutover but as a trust problem to be designed for — mapping the exact workflows legal and financial staff depended on daily and rebuilding them in 3E Workspace so nothing felt lost in translation.
Mapping the end-to-end UX process across legacy workflows and the 3E Workspace migration.
Key moves across the engagement:
- Ran deep workflow audits with practicing legal and financial staff to identify exactly where the legacy platform's mental models needed to be preserved — and where 3E Workspace could genuinely improve on them
- Redesigned the onboarding and conversion path for firms migrating to 3E Workspace, reducing the friction and perceived risk that had suppressed adoption
- Diagnosed why the business intelligence project had failed four times — root-caused it to a mismatch between the reporting model and how firm leadership actually made decisions — and redesigned the UX around real decision-making workflows rather than raw data exposure
- Established a shared design language and governance model across all 10 products, giving Elite a coherent UX strategy for the first time
- Partnered closely with engineering and product leadership to keep the BI relaunch scoped, testable, and shippable after years of stalled attempts
Usability testing with practicing legal and financial staff shaped every major workflow decision.
Early concepts evolved into high-fidelity 3E Workspace interfaces through iterative design reviews.
A universal search pattern designed to work consistently across all 10 Elite products.
20x growth, a shipped BI platform, and industry recognition
The redesigned migration experience helped drive a 20x increase in the 3E Workspace customer base, with legacy conversion reaching 50.8% — turning a stalled initiative into the platform's primary growth path. The business intelligence project, which had failed to ship four times before this engagement, finally launched to firm leadership and became a reference point for how Elite scoped and delivered complex products going forward.
Design leadership across all 10 products gave Thomson Reuters Elite a consistent, trusted UX for the first time — work that was recognized with an industry award for design excellence in legal and financial technology.