FTI Consulting, Inc.

Welcome to the FTI Consulting third quarter 2026 earnings conference call. All participants will be in 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, and to withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note today's event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mollie Hawkes, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning. Welcome to the FCI Consulting Conference Call to discuss the company's third 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 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.fcisconsulting.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, 2025, and our quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, and in our other filings with the SEC. Investors request to not place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements which speak only as of the date of this earnings call and will not be updated. FCI assumes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements, whether it is 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 Gap Measures are included in the press release and the accompanying financial tables that we issued this morning and were also posted to the Investor Relations section of our website. Lastly, there are two additional 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 a PDF of our historical financial and operating data, which have been updated to include our third quarter 2026 results. With these formalities out of the way, I'm joined today by Steve Gunby, our CEO and Chairman, and Angela Nam, our Chief Financial Officer. At this time, I'll turn the call over to our CEO and Chairman, Steve Gunby.

Thank you, Mollie. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. As I suspect many of you have already seen this morning, this morning we reported a powerful third quarter. It was an amazing quarter by many measures. Our revenues exceeded $1 billion for the first time. All five of our segments delivered top-line growth. Adjusted EBITDA grew 18%. And adjusted EPS was $3.84. Again, let me focus on that last number a bit and see if I can put a little perspective on it. It's not only a record. Almost as much as we earned in the first two quarters of this year combined. and I realized just a couple days ago that it is more than we earned in the first two years of my CEO tenure combined. But for me, it's a pretty special number showing, I think, the power of this organization and the progress we have made. Now, my experience is anyone at time, anyone has a great quarter, the first thing you have to do is to check how real it is. Not in an accounting sense, we always focus on the right accounting, but how much was driven by one-time factors? The type of factors that just could happen to cut positively in a given quarter. And if you do that analysis here, you find out that a lot did cut positively this quarter. We had significantly higher than usual success fees, we had a lower tax rate, and we had a number of smaller factors that also cut positively. Having said that, I worked to normalize for all of those factors, and I still had a hard time getting the number below 290 a share. which compares with the average adjusted VPS over the prior four quarters in the low tubes. So even with all the adjustments I could make, our performance this quarter ended up powerful, a seemingly powerful reaffirmation of the strength of our earnings potential and our growth potential. After a number of quarters recently, that did not seem to reaffirm that power anywhere nearly as strongly, which of course has raised the question, why? What happened after? Why did this happen after five to six quarters that weren't so powerful? Did we change our fundamental strategy? Did the world somehow change radically in our favor? What's going on? I assume some of those questions occurred to many of you, not just me. So, rather than go through the details of the quarter, which Angela will do, I thought I would try to share some perspective on those questions.