‘Recovering Lawyers’ Set Up Practice to Build Healthier Workplaces
Resonance Inc. isn’t your regular law firm. In fact, it isn’t a law firm at all. Two self-proclaimed “lawyers in recovery” Alyson Townsend and Trisha Perry have created a company they say is entirely unique.
Resonance Inc., founded last fall and incorporated this past January, aims to help employers achieve an optimal workplace through consulting on what they call the three pillars: governance, creating and maintenance of a healthy workplace and workplace legal services.
While Townsend and Perry do not offer legal representation to employers or employees, their backgrounds are solidly in the legal field. They’ve leveraged those backgrounds and skills as well as mediation accreditation to offer their new suite of services.
“We want to assist companies when they find themselves in places of conflict,” Townsend says. “We won’t do any litigation because we believe that is not necessarily the best path for the clients we serve.”
Perry says the idea for the new company was born out of their belief that there is a close relationship between an employee’s health, happiness and productivity and the overall health of the business for which they work. She says they want to make a difference not only in the lives of employees but to the prosperity of businesses and organizations.
“It was really important for us not to be a law firm,” Perry says. “What we really wanted was to be able to have long-term relationships with our clients, almost in a way act as in-house consultants. Knowing all we can about their business allows us to tailor solutions for each of our clients.”
Perry says her experience in law made her recognize the limitations of the practice. As a lawyer, she would often be brought in only once a client was already in some kind of trouble. She says her job at that point was to try and mitigate the damage already done and help resolve the conflict, but that she never had the opportunity to go into a workplace and help establish policy to avoid conflict in the first place.
“The ideal goal is that employees feel personally motivated to be there so that they’re not motivated by some external force but that they feel valued enough that they’re contributing,” Perry says. “Almost every employee you talk to, one of the biggest things they want is to know they’re adding value, to know that their work matters.”
Townsend says it’s difficult to find a company that has everything together to provide employees with this kind of satisfaction. She says their target market is small to medium-sized businesses that don’t have the staff or means to access the services Resonance provides individually from other companies or do the work in-house.
With so many issues facing employers today, it’s clear why services like Resonance’s would be important. Perry says marijuana legalization, in particular, is one that employers will be sorting out for years to come and that it’s something they’re having conversations about with their clients already.
“It’s actually fascinating because it will have to be dealt with at least initially by workplaces just like any other regulated product is. I guess the difference is the medicinal use [of] marijuana. You can’t treat it like you would treat alcohol,” Perry says.
“Most certainly you’ll see organizations prohibiting, I would think, recreational use but then you have the medicinal use … The question in that context becomes … how do you accommodate that need for medicinal use.”
Townsend says the future for Resonance is essentially limitless. She says they hope to one day offer even more services from human resources to financial assistance and IT, a full suite of workplace services. She also says there could be the possibility of expanding not only locally but to hubs across the country.
While the majority of their current clients are in New Brunswick, Perry says this type of work can expand past provincial borders and has already started to.
“We do have some clients that are outside the province as far away as B.C., so it’s great to know you can take this service and transcend borders with it because sure, employment law in terms of legislation is different in each province, but the common law is the same across the country, with the exception of Quebec,” Perry says.
“The principles of governance and strategic planning and conflict management, those don’t have borders.”