FTI Consulting, Inc.

Welcome to the FDI Consulting first quarter of 2026 earnings conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. And should you need any assistance today, 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. And to withdraw a question, please press star, then two. Please also note that this event is being recorded today. I would now like to turn the conference over to Molly Hawkes, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning. Welcome to the FTI Consulting Conference Call to discuss the company's first quarter 2026 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 2026, based on management's current beliefs and expectations. These forward-looking statements involve many 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.fpiconsulting.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 31st, 2025, our quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, 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, an Excel and PDF of our historical financial and operating data, which have been updated to include our first quarter 2026 results. With these formalities out of the way, I'm joined today by Steve Gumby, our CEO and Chairman, and Paul Linton, our Interim Chief Financial Officer and Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer. At this time, I will turn the call over to our CEO and Chairman, Steve Gumby.

Thank you, Molly. Welcome, everybody. and thank you all for joining us today. As you may have seen this morning, we reported once again solid results for the quarter. I will talk to those results in a moment briefly, and then Paul, of course, will talk to them somewhat more extensively. With your permission today, I'd like to start discussion, however, in a somewhat different place. Typically, in these sessions, I start with some perspective on the quarter or on the last few quarters and then try to zoom out from those to see if I can draw from them any lessons as to why we've been successful and then some lessons about the future, why typically I at least continue to believe that that experience suggests an extraordinarily bright future. Today, let me reverse that order, drawing on some of what we just experienced at our all-SMB meeting a couple weeks ago. and see if I can use that experience to perhaps share some perspective on this year and on this quarter. We finished that all SMD meeting just a few days ago. At every one of these meetings, so many people come up to me or others after the meeting and say just how terrific a meeting they felt it was. In terms of the work that got done, but I think for most people even more powerfully, in terms of the sense of pride sense of excitement, a sense of conviction about the future of the company that people emerge from those meetings with. That's been true at prior meetings, but after this one, my EXCO colleagues and I were struck by just how many people came up to us and shared those thoughts and just how deeply they seem to be feeling them. So I thought I might share a little bit about that, why that might be, and why it is that after such a meeting like this, that so many people leave with a conviction about the magnitude of the opportunities yet in front of this company. And the conviction that this company is still so much closer, the beginning of the powerful journey we're on than the end. So why was this meeting so good? I think actually part of the power of the meeting had nothing to do with the meeting itself. It had to do with just how pumped up so many people were coming into the meeting. Pumped up particularly about what they had each individually and collectively accomplished over the prior 18 months. Paul and I today will talk about all the stuff we still have to do because there's always stuff to do. We have a long way to go on Compass Lexicon. This quarter we did also have some of the normal blips. For example, FLC didn't quite perform as we intended. Our tax rate was a little higher than we expected. We had some higher SG&A expenses and so forth. But if you go back 18 months, you might just recall just how many of our businesses were facing truly tough challenges exiting 2024 and heading into 2025. If you remember, CorpFin had been down two quarters in a row. FLC was facing fundamental uncertainty because of tremendous new regulatory changes. Tech was facing a major second request headwind. And StratCom was coming off probably the most challenging 18 months it had faced in a while. people coming into this meeting in Orlando knew that not withstanding those multitudes of headwinds in the end, they, we had managed to deliver a record level of performance as a company in 2025 as a whole and in the bulk of our businesses. And we ended the year with tremendous momentum in most of our businesses. The fact that we had gotten through 2025, and turned every business, Compass Lexicon aside, but every other business back onto its long-term, tremendously positive trajectory, created, I believe, a powerful sense of pride, motivation, and importantly, confidence that people brought into the meeting, even if they credited Molly and others for creating it in the meeting. So that was one cause. I do think those feelings were powerfully reinforced by some of the stories told in the meeting. The stories of the actions and activities in 2024 and 2025 that led to those results, but also some of the powerful multi-year success stories that were brought to life once again in the meeting. Those stories at an aggregate level powerful, and they are powerful. I can't talk about all of them, but an example is Mike Eisenban talking about the fact that CorpFins today is three times the size it was eight years ago, or perhaps even more powerfully, he and others talking about how folks in the room made that happen. The extension of our restructuring practice around the world, the doubling down of the restructuring practice in the US and UK, even though it had always been strong, the extension into new businesses and transactions and transformation, or analogous stories about the people in this room in other segments or geographies. For example, Sophie talking about all the efforts that took tech from a struggling business to one that is in the face of very challenging market conditions is continuing to win, and at least in my measure, is going faster than any other competitor. So I think people came in really motivated, but that motivation got tremendous reinforcement by plenary presentations, but also I think at least as powerfully by sharing stories with colleagues about the actions that each person had taken, the actions that led to those overall results embedded in the plenary presentations. It suggested it wasn't magic wands that somebody waved. It wasn't markets that gave us those results. It was what people in that room individually and collectively had done that got us to where we are. The third reason that people highlighted, and actually I think probably highlighted more than the first two as motivating, was just the group of the people in the room. Somebody said to me, you know, you look around and just a group you are proud to be associated with. A group of people, some of whom I've known for a while and I've loved working with, but then you also see this terrific group of promotions and these people who you've managed to attract. At the end of the opening speech, we asked people to think back to the all-SMD meeting we had at the end of 2018 and asked everyone in the room who had been in that room in 2018 from a bunch of geographies to stand. So we asked anybody from Italy who was in the room today and had been there in 2018 to stand, as well as the Nordics and Amsterdam and the Middle East. We started with that group.