CRA International,Inc.

Good day, everyone, and welcome to Charles River Associates' second quarter 2021 earnings conference call. Today's call is being recorded. The company's earnings release and prepared remarks from CRA's chief financial officer are posted on the investor relations section of CRA's website at crai.com. With us today are CRA's president and chief executive officer, Paul Malley, chief financial officer, Dan Mahoney, and Chief Corporate Development Officer, Chad Holmes. At this time, I'd like to turn the call over to Mr. Mahoney for opening remarks. Please go ahead, Dan.

Thank you, Rob, and good morning to everyone. Please note that the statements made during this conference call, including guidance on future revenue and non-GAAP EBITDA margin, and any other statements concerning the future business, operating results, or financial condition of CRA, including those statements using the terms expect, outlook, or similar terms, are forward-looking statements as defined in Section 21 of the Exchange Act. Information contained in these forward-looking statements is based on management's current expectations and is inherently uncertain. Actual performance and results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in these statements due to many important factors, including the extent and duration of the COVID-19 pandemic and any potential impact on our financial condition and results of operations. Additional information regarding these factors is included in today's release and in CRA's periodic reports, including our most recently filed annual report on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q filed at the SEC. CRA undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements after the date of this call. Additionally, we will refer to some non-GAAP financial measures and certain measures presented on a constant currency basis on this call. Everyone is encouraged to refer to today's release and related CFO remarks for reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to their GAAP comparable measures and descriptions of the calculation of EBITDA and measures presented on a constant currency basis. Let me now turn it over to Paul for his report. Paul?

Thanks, Dan, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. The second quarter of fiscal 2021 demonstrated continued momentum in the business as strong demand for our services drove CRA's outstanding performance. Building on the impressive start of fiscal 2021, CRA again reported the highest quarterly revenue in the company's history, increasing 20.5% year-over-year to $148.2 million. Our expansion was broad-based, with eight practices recording year-over-year revenue growth of more than 20%. Geographically, our growth was also balanced, with revenue from our North American and international operations increasing by 21.9% and 14.4% respectively. The second quarter marked the 22nd consecutive quarter of year-over-year revenue growth, with CRA growing by more than 10% year-over-year in 15 of those quarters. CRA's top-line growth during the second quarter drove significant profit expansion. Specifically, non-GAAP net income, earnings per diluted share, and EBITDA grew year-over-year by 82%, 91%, and 61%, respectively. This growth resulted in the highest quarterly levels for each of these profit metrics. It was truly an exceptional quarter, top to bottom. I would now like to highlight some of the services provided during the quarter. Within legal and regulatory, our antitrust and competition economics practice grew revenue by approximately 55% year over year. This growth established a new high in quarterly revenue for the practice, as demand for antitrust and merger-related services remained strong. M&A markets continued to rebound from pandemic lows and reached historic highs. Worldwide M&A activity increased 131% during the first half of 2021, compared to year-ago levels, and represented the strongest first half of any year for mergers and acquisitions since records began in 1980. Against this backdrop, CRA worked on transactions across a range of industries and geographies. For example, a team of competition experts supported the merging parties in a recently completed transaction combining two large nationwide providers of specialized truck, trucks, and heavy equipment. CRA analyzed competitive dynamics in the market for specialty truck rentals, sales, and aftermarket service. CRA's analysis confirmed that the relevant markets are geographically broad and the barriers to competitive entry, expansion, and repositioning are minimal. The transaction received unconditional clearance from the U.S. Department of Justice. A team of CRA competition experts in Brussels, London, and Washington, D.C. supported AirCap's acquisition of GE Capital Aviation Services. The $30 billion transactions brought together aircraft, engine, and helicopter portfolios to create a leading aviation leasing company. CRA's work included addressing regulatory questions about potential horizontal, and vertical merger effects, including those associated with GE's post-transaction minority ownership interest in the combined company. The transaction has received regulatory clearance from the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Commission. The global project team continues to work to secure regulatory clearance in additional jurisdictions worldwide. Looking more broadly at the legal market, total case filings continue to rebound and approach pre-pandemic levels. For the second quarter of 2021, total case filings were up approximately 10% year over year. A rebound can also be seen within the courtroom as the number of total court judgments during the second quarter increased approximately 20% relative to the year-ago period. The metrics are consistent with the experience of our experts who continue to draft reports and deliver testimony on matters that have been delayed by the pandemic, as well as new matters as they arise. In light of these market conditions, I'm especially pleased with the strong growth in our legal and regulatory services, which grew by more than 30 percent in the second quarter. Within this service area, every practice expanded year over year. Notably, our antitrust and competition economics financial economics, intellectual property, labor and employment, and risk investigations and analytics practices, each increased revenue by more than 20% year over year. During the quarter, CRA's financial economics practice assisted two depository institutions with review of overdraft practices and fees at a consumer account level. In addition, the practice supported two testifying experts, and a series of litigations involving maintenance and servicing for properties that were foreclosed. A growing focus of the practice is to provide more validation and model risk management support for several FinTech clients using a range of machine learning techniques to underwrite and price loans. Also during the second quarter, the intellectual property practice advised on multiple high-stakes patent, trademark, and copyright and trade secret matters in a variety of forms, including federal and state courts, international arbitration tribunals, and U.S. International Trade Commission. These matters covered a wide range of industries and technologies, including cloud computing, communication networks, luxury brands, mobile devices, medical devices, pharmaceuticals, and oil and gas extraction. Notably, a CRA expert determined damages on behalf of the world's leading luxury brands regarding copyright, trademark, and trade dress infringement claims against a competitor that sold products through e-commerce platform reaching multiple geographic markets. CRA's damage analysis addressed profit disgorgement and royalty damages associated with the defendant's infringing activities. The labor and employment practice recently supported a CRA senior consultant in rebutting the expert report by plaintiffs in a class action matter alleging age discrimination among those selected for termination through a reduction in forced action. Additionally, the labor and employment and antitrust and competition economics practice continue to combine these respective expertise by assisting clients facing alleged noncompetitive employment agreements that plaintiffs allege result in wage suppression. During the second quarter, the risk investigations and analytics practice continued to perform multi-jurisdictional investigative assignments in the United States, Brazil, and the United Kingdom. For example, the practice executed a large fraud investigation with the transportation sector examining payments among various related parties over a 10-year period. Our life sciences practice was down approximately 10% relative to an extremely strong second quarter in 2020, but we continue to see good opportunities in this space as our consultants address challenging and important topics for our clients. During the second quarter, CRA helped a top 10 pharmaceutical company determine how best to communicate complex ideas around the future of healthcare with a global audience. In a project spanning six countries, the CRA team collected feedback from audiences across the entire healthcare spectrum, including patients, payers, administrators, policy makers, technology companies, and physicians in order to optimize strategy and communication. CRA's life sciences practice is also helping a pre-IPO digital therapeutics company develop commercial strategies to support its growing portfolio. CRA's contributions have included identifying infrastructure needs to support healthy market growth, analyzing direct-to-consumer versus employer-provided benefit strategies, identifying appropriate roles for distribution, and promotional partnerships and developing launch plans for portfolio assets. Continuing with our other practices, we saw strong performance by our auctions and competitive bidding, energy, and Maricon practices, each of which increased revenue in the second quarter by 20% year over year. As the independent trading manager of the global dairy trade, CRA's auctions and competitive bidding practice continues to manage the twice-monthly multi-seller, multi-buyer auctions with participation from around the world. Additionally, the auctions practice is working with CRA's energy practice to support a Midwestern utility's long-term and medium-term resource planning. CRA's cross-functional team is helping the client select new wind, solar, and thermal generating projects and energy storage options that will combine to replace several coal units scheduled to retire over the coming years. Elsewhere within the energy practice, CRA's team worked with an infrastructure investment firm to carve out a large European utility from its parent company. The team is working on devising the corporate strategy for the group as a whole, as well as for each of the individual businesses under new ownership. Additionally, the energy practice assisted a large natural gas utility with the preparation of long-term strategic resource planning process that will focus on key investment initiatives and decarbonization approaches for their utilities in the Midwest. CRA will be continuing to assist them as they implement this approach over the coming year. Our AmeriCon practice is working with a child care provider to build a robust demand model for one of its service offerings. including the impact of utilization price and mix at the intersection of the type of care and geography. Additionally, the team is partnering with a leading consumer packaged goods provider on a strategic transformation of its portfolio. These actions have resulted in the sale of underperforming products and assets, investment in high-value growth businesses, and a more than two-fold increase in market valuation since the start of the project. I'm grateful to all of my colleagues for their hard work as we continue to help our clients address their most important challenges. As our second quarter results demonstrate, our portfolio of services is highly valued by our clients. Moreover, we are well positioned to maintain the momentum in our business. During the second quarter, we saw our project lead flow and new project originations grow by nearly 20%. and 40% respectively compared to the second quarter of 2020. While we remain mindful that uncertainties around global economic, business, health, and political conditions can affect our business, we are again raising both our revenue and EBITDA guidance to reflect the continued strength in the business. For the full year of fiscal 2021, on a constant currency basis relative to fiscal 2020, we now expect revenue in the range of $565 million to $575 million, which is an increased and narrowed range relative to our prior revenue guidance of $550 to $570 million. We are also raising our non-GAAP EBITDA margin range to 11.2% to 11.7%. This compares with the range of 10.0% to 10.5% previously. With that, I'll turn the call over to Chad and then Dan for a few additional comments. Chad?