FTI Consulting, Inc.

Welcome to the FDI Consulting first quarter 2021 earnings conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Molly Hawks, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning. Welcome to the FDI Consulting Conference Call to discuss the company's first quarter 2021 earnings results as reported this morning. Management will begin with formal remarks after which they will take your questions. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that this conference call may include forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 that involve risks and uncertainties. Forward-looking statements include statements concerning plans, objectives, goals, strategies, future events, future revenues, future results and performance, expectations, plans or intentions relating to financial performance, acquisitions, share repurchases, business trends, and other information or other matters that are not historical, including statements regarding estimates of our future financial results and other matters. For discussion of risks and other factors that may cause actual results or events to differ from those contemplated by forward-looking statements, investors should review the Safe Harbor Statement in the earnings press release issued this morning, a copy of which is available on our website at www.fticonsulting.com. as well as other disclosures under the heading of risk factors and forward-looking information in our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2020 and in our other filings with the SEC. Investors are cautioned not to place under reliance on any forward-looking statements which speak only as of the date of this earnings call and will not be updated. During the call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures such as total segment operating income, adjusted EBITDA, total adjusted segment EBITDA, adjusted earnings per diluted share, adjusted net income, adjusted EBITDA margin, and free cash flow. For discussion of these and other non-GAAP financial measures, as well as our reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures, investors should review the press release and the accompanying financial tables that we issued this morning, which includes the reconciliations. Lastly, there are two items that have been posted to the investor relations section of our website this morning for your reference. These include a quarterly earnings presentation and an Excel and PDF of our historical financial and operating data, which have been updated to include our first quarter 2021 results. Of note, during today's prepared remarks, management will not speak directly to the quarterly earnings presentation posted to the Investor Relations section of our website. To ensure our disclosures are consistent, these slides provide the same details as they have historically and, as I have said, are available on the Investor Relations section of our website. With these formalities out of the way, I am joined today by Stephen Gumby, our President and Chief Executive Officer, and Ajay Sabharwal, our Chief Financial Officer. At this time, I will turn the call over to President and Chief Executive Officer Steve Gunby.

Thank you, Molly. I was just checking to make sure I was on off mute for a change. Good morning to everyone, and thank you all for joining us. Let me start with a couple words on COVID, even though I'm sure all of you, like I, are so sick of the topic and the issue. I hope... everyone on this call continues to be well and that all of us on this call are increasingly able to get vaccinated. For those of us in the U.S., I think we can sense at least the beginning of a change in mood. At least for me, it's wonderful to see the rollout of vaccines. And I don't know anybody who doesn't get incredibly excited when we see our friends or our family members getting vaccinated. And I think that's true for many of you as well and for many people in some other parts of the world too, particularly to the UK. I think on the other hand, I think most of us know the story is not as true every place around the world. When I talk to colleagues on the continent of Europe, the story feels somewhat aligned, but also somewhat different. There's a lot of frustration about the slowness of the rollout of the vaccine, and it feels very different. I felt very different last week when I talked with colleagues in Latin America and some colleagues in India. If we look at the statistics, I think we see that global cases, globally total cases right now are actually at the highest levels we have ever seen, the world has ever seen. Of course, the rollout of the vaccine, though happening around the world, is happening at very different paces depending on where you sit. The good news, I think, is that we can all at this point see a light. We can see that light at the end of the tunnel. And I'm so excited for those of us for whom that light feels close. I just want to also share, say, mine and my colleagues' hearts and thoughts are also with all of those folks within our firm and within yours for whom the light still feels further away.