FTI Consulting, Inc.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the FTI Consulting first quarter 2025 earnings conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please send to 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 and then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your questions, you may press star and two Please note that this event is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference call over to Molly Haught, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning. Welcome to the FTI Consulting Conference Call to discuss the company's first quarter 2025 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 the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act, including the company's outlook and expectations for the full year 2025 based on management's current beliefs and expectations. These forward-looking statements include risks and uncertainties, assumptions and estimates, and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from such statements. For a 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 headings of risk factors and forward-looking information in our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2024, or our quarterly reports on Form 10Q and in our other filings with the SEC. Investors are cautioned not to place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this earnings call and will not be updated. FTI Consulting assumes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as required by applicable law. During the call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. A discussion of any non-GAAP financial measures addressed on this call and reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP measures are included in the press release and the accompanying financial tables that we issued this morning. Lastly, there are two items that have been posted to the investor relations section of our website for your reference. These include a quarterly earnings presentation and an Excel and PDF of our historical financial and operating data. which have been upgraded to include our first quarter 2025 results. With these formalities out of the way, I'm joined today by Stephen Gumby, our President and Chief Executive Officer, and Ajay Savarwal, our Chief Financial Officer. At this time, I will turn the call over to our President and Chief Executive Officer, Steve Gumby.

Thank you, Molly. Welcome, everyone. Thank you all for joining us today. As I hope you saw this morning, we reported a strong first quarter. The first quarter did benefit, as Ajay will detail, some one-time items. But even adjusting for anything one might think of as anomalous, it was a solid quarter. So as we all know, there are lots of puts and takes in the world right now. There's lots of uncertainty. The start of this year is overall quite consistent with what our expectations were in February when we gave you guidance for the year. Ajay will, as usual, go through the details of this quarter in his typical structured fashion. Given the complexity of the world today, with all the various theories of where the markets and client needs might go, we thought it might be worthwhile for me to go a little deeper than I normally go on the individual businesses and share some qualitative observations, both on the performances of each of those businesses so far this year, but also on some of the different theories of what their outlooks could be. So I'll be a little longer than usual. I hope you'll forgive me that. I want to start with FLC this quarter. I hope you saw just how fabulous a quarter FLC had. I think the EBITDA this quarter was roughly comparable to what we probably averaged for half a year for that business over the last few years. The driver of those results is that the teams there have been winning and delivering on some incredibly major roles. I would love, on this call, to talk about a lot of the specifics. Unfortunately, many of those assignments are confidential because of the nature of the work. But the roles the teams are playing are important, they're critical, they're powerful.