Welcome to the FTI Consulting 2008 fourth quarter conference call. (Operator Instructions) For opening remarks and introductions I would like to turn the call over to Eric Boyriven. Eric Boyriven Good morning and welcome to the FTI Consulting conference call to discuss the company's 2008 fourth quarter and full year results which were reported this morning. Management will begin with formal remarks, after which we will take your questions. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that this conference call may include all statements other than statements of historical fact made during this call including without limitation, statements regarding our future financial position, business strategy, budgets, projected costs and plans, future industry growth and objectives of management's future operations are forward-looking statements that involve uncertainties and risks. There can be no assurance that actual results will not differ from the company's expectations. The company has experienced fluctuating revenue, operating income and cash flow in period and expect that this may occur from time to time in the future. As a result of these possible fluctuations, the company's actual results may differ from our projections. Further, preliminary results are subjected to normal year end adjustments. A number of factors could cause such differences including the pace and timing of additional acquisitions, the company's ability to realize cost savings and efficiencies, competitive and general economic conditions, retention of staff and clients and other risks described in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Investors are cautioned not to place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements which speak only as of the date of this earnings call. The company does not undertake to update any of these statements in light of new information or future events. We use EBITDA in evaluating financial performance. We define EBITDA as operating income…

Good morning and thank you for joining us this morning to discuss our fourth quarter and year end results. I hope you have had a chance to review and read the press release. If you have not, as Eric said, it is available on our web site at www.fticonsulting.com. With me this morning on the call are Dennis Shaughnessy, our Chairman, Jorge Celaya, our Chief Financial Officer, David Bannister, our Chief Administrative Officer, Dom De Napoli, our Chief Operating Officer, and Declan Kelly, our Chief Integration Officer. 2008 was another very important year for our company. Despite global financial chaos, we invested even more heavily in our future, diversifying our business, expanding our platform, building our brand and generating cash. Organic growth was strong at 17% while contributions from key strategic acquisitions brought out total growth to 29%. Our international expansion continued as London became our second largest operation, boasting the full complement of all of our segments. Most importantly, though chaos continued to reign in the fourth quarter of 2008, as we have seen in every previous cycle, paralysis began to delay action and our markets began to stir. In forensic litigation, the names ripped from today's headlines appear to be setting the stage for an excellent year. Likewise, in economic consulting we have seen the major matters of the last 12 months begin to devolve into a dispute resolution phase and in technology, we believe we have seen the beginnings of the return of the big case phenomenon as regulatory agencies brought not only a burst of energy, but from an activist President and energized congress and an outraged public. It is in corporate finance restructuring however where the results are even more dramatic. Since the beginning of the year, we have opened an average of almost four…

(Operator Instructions) Your first call comes from Paul Ginocchio – Duetsche Bank. Paul Ginocchio – Duetsche Bank: Could you maybe break out the difference in tech between sort of pricing and investment on the margin?

You mean the impact of pricing costs into margins, I'd say the majority would be pricing and a significant minority would be R&D spend. Paul Ginocchio – Duetsche Bank: Then R&D spend is not going where, I think you've gone through some investments.

Yeah, we were very happy to announce at the Legal Tech the successful integration of the Attenix Ringtail platforms and we are continuing that spend rate in order to add what we think will be dramatic increases to the efficiencies of that new platform over the next 12 months. Paul Ginocchio – Duetsche Bank: In the fourth quarter, was there any significant success fees in your corp restructuring practice or what that mainly just ongoing business.

There were success fees, but business as usual. Paul Ginocchio – Duetsche Bank: I know there was one high profile where the creditors pushed back on some success fees in retail you're trying to get. Is there any issues with getting success fees in the cycle?

Not so far.

Your next question comes from James Janesky – Stifel Nicolaus. James Janesky – Stifel Nicolaus: As a follow up to the tech margin question, you had talked about getting back to the low 30% margins over time, and you had also talked about some momentum with some recent wins in cases. Do I assume those revenues do come on line, that we would have more natural margin expansion despite the pricing pressure and the continued spend on R&D?

We will see margins move back up even though we have made a conscious decision to continue the spend rate of R&D. As Jack had enumerated, we are being brought into very large, complex challenges with a global reach and the pricing pressure tends to abate the more complex the issues, and a lot of the ones you've either been reading about or heard about are extremely complex, require very sophisticated data management collection and analysis. So we would definitely expect to see some margin expansion, especially in the second half. James Janesky – Stifel Nicolaus: And some of these larger cases that you've won recently, you talked about Maddoff and Dryer, are they flowing through multiple segments within the company?

Maddoff, Dryer are multiple segments, yes. James Janesky – Stifel Nicolaus: When we look at the seasonality of earnings other than Jack, you did point out about the pressure in the first quarter because of payroll resets and such, that combined with these cases building throughout 2009, would I also assume that the earnings will build as the year progresses?

Yes, that would be a good assumption. James Janesky – Stifel Nicolaus: Could you talk about what interest expense you would expect for the year and what tax rate you would expect?

I think the tax rate should be about flat at around 39%. The interest expense if you include the change in the convert that Jack mentioned in his opening remarks that should add about $4.6 million to interest expense. So combining interest expense with that, interest expense would normally be flat; you add $4.6 million in interest income should be down a bit. So we're probably looking at net interest combined probably, the interest expense about $1.2 million higher per quarter. James Janesky – Stifel Nicolaus: $1.2 per quarter?

So about $4.7 million for the year.

It's a function really of two things. Cash interest expense should be slightly down. You can almost model it off of last year, down a little bit, and then you have to add a non cash charge for the new rules on how you calculate convertible interest, and that's going to add about $0.05 per share or $0.12 per quarter to the interest charge. James Janesky – Stifel Nicolaus: Would that be also subtracted from the prior year?

Yes. Part of what the accounting will do is that as we report our 2009 first quarter and so forth, we will be for comparative purposes restating the comparable quarters of 2008 which has a similar affect of about $0.1.2 per quarter.

Your next question comes from Arnold Ursaner – CJS Securities. Arnold Ursaner – CJS Securities: First question I have relates to your head count. You mentioned you would increase it by about 14% in 2009. Is that from the year end levels and how much of those would you expect to get either through just hiring individuals or through acquisitions or practices?

That would be fairly much what we'd look at organically to support the organic growth that we have. We don't include any impact of acquisitions in our guidance. We would also expect obviously some opportunities to have some group hires and things like that which we're gaining a lot of momentum and as we open up new areas, especially in Europe, we mentioned that we are fortunate to have a group join us in Canada that has a significant impact on our ability to also service Mexico and Latin America. We think in those areas, we see a large opportunity.

Including acquisitions, head count is almost up 30%, almost 29%. And the difference between the organic and obviously t hat number was the head count acquired through acquisitions, and we'll grow head count. As you know, we don't budget acquisitions, but as Jack mentioned head count is planned to grow in the area of 14%. And that is from last year, from the end of the year. Arnold Ursaner – CJS Securities: Second question I have relates to, kind of thinking about all of your businesses combined for the upcoming year, obviously the piece related to restructuring seems like it's doing extraordinarily well with tremendous backlogs, but the problem areas, FLC and tech, it sounds like you're poised for a pretty good cyclical pickup. Is that another way to think about this?

I would say, let me go through them this way. Corp is obviously going to have a tremendous year. Tech and FLC have come out of the gate in the first quarter much faster than we had planned. We thought they would have very strong second half of the year if the momentum continues. It's too early to declare victory obviously. They're going to do very well. ECON as we said is moving along very nicely being engaged in some really interesting new assignments. They are adding capacity. They're one of the groups that are definitely adding capacity on an organic and a group hire basis. The one division that we think will have the most headwinds to go through not only on a FX basis because so much of their operations are offshore, but just in an internal market basis would be the strategic communications. So great phenomenal year in restructuring. We think a very good year in tech and FLC. Continued excellent performance by ECON. Tough year ahead for strategic communications. Recently some people have done some historical perspective analysis on litigation. They've gone back and looked at for example foreign practices cases and you go back to 1992, every year before an election, a Presidential election, they have dwindled to the single digit level and every year following the election they've exploded to make up for what was probably a lame duck view towards enforcement. We truly believe that certainly our experience here over the last 20 years has been seeing that kind of renewed vigor and enforcement and regulation follow. I think it's exacerbated by the fact that you have as the great man said, the tides going out and you're seeing who's swimming naked. The amount of fraud we're seeing, started at a much earlier time in the cycle than it did back ion 2001, 2002. 2201 you saw the explosion. The capital markets you saw the explosion and the litigation and regulatory happen in 2003 and 2004. Here it's starting almost immediately so that bodes well for that market place again over the next three to five years. Arnold Ursaner – CJS Securities: I think what I'm trying to do is equate your 14% head count growth. You had acquisitions that are still contributing into '09. In line with your 12% to 20% revenue growth, unless you have some material give back on fees, or something else, it would seem to me your revenue growth should be certainly towards the higher end of that range based on head count.

One thing we're lapping don't forget, is we're lapping a tough, tough currency. This time last year the pound and the euro were significantly premium against the dollar. I think it was about 2.1, the one was. The pound exchange rate is down to 1.4, and so what's happening is if we showed you the growth in constant currencies, you would be right on it and your assessment it would be at the upper end if not even through the upper end. But we've got given the good news about global is the assignments, the bad news about being global is you have FX issues and it's clearly affecting the top line growth. We're also hiring more than ever at the lower level of staff. The head count increase is more skewed than ever at the lower level. Arnold Ursaner – CJS Securities: Can you give us a feel for the shape of how business has evolved so far this quarter, meaning kind of walk us through the very early part of January? I know when you were at our conference; things were still very, didn't pick up immediately after year end, but perhaps give us a feel for how the last eight weeks or so have shaped up?

Building momentum, large assignments, incredible amount of new engagement acquisition in corp as Jack said averaging about four a day. And again, I think the biggest surprise is very, very large fraud investigation assignments.

I think probably you can use as a benchmark, January 20. After that in terms of political hearings, in terms of people at the government being sent back to their desks and finding that they better do something picked up dramatically when you really had the investiture of the new administration.

Your next question comes from Andrew Fones – UBS. Andrew Fones – UBS: Just following on about the question earlier about revenue growth guidance and the fact that it appears from the head count growth that you might go through the high end of the range. I was wondering if you could also talk a little bit about the relative revenue per consultant for international versus U.S. and of that 14% growth, what do you expect to come internationally versus U.S.

I don't think we've seen a particularly different view of the revenue per consultant. I mean, when you look at economic consulting because it's built on a system where you have the highly reputation economist, they typically have a lot of revenue for the senior people, and their revenue professionals are pretty much the same. So I don't think that we've noticed a big change in that number. Professional, we would expect that to stay relatively the same. Andrew Fones – UBS: In terms of the hiring, can you give us a sense of how much of that will come internationally? You mentioned you'd be adding people in ECOM consulting and corporate financing.

The bulk of the people will be where our businesses already are because they need to sustain the growth that they have. On a percentage basis, we're starting with a very small base. We would think that, we're hopeful that we'll significantly expand the capacity both in restructuring and an economic consulting in London. We would hope to move economic consulting and also restructuring onto the continent. Those would be smaller kind of step out acquisition there. And then we continue very strong in South America, Latin America on both the investigation side and with the restructuring side, and we would continue to explore Asia for technology for investigations where Steve Vickers is out there in Hong Kong running our operation. So that's kind of the pattern. Andrew Fones – UBS: If you could, controlling the new technology platform, can you give us any thoughts on clients reaction to the new platform and whether you think there was any kind of delay in projects ahead of that launch in order for people to take advantage of the new platform and what kind of trend you've seen post the launch.

I think the response that we got from participants in legal tech were for the combined platform has been excellent. I think sort of the window that some of our technologists gave the constituencies on the applications that we're working on and developing ourselves and partnering with other technology firms caused a lot of excitement. I think as we said, we're seeing technology begin to build momentum. A lot of that is just simply a pick up of very large engagements, but we're seeing the applications of the technology by a wider constituency so we're pleased so far.

Your next question comes from Timothy McHugh – William Blair & Co. Timothy McHugh – William Blair & Co.: I was wondering if you could give some more context to your comments about four cases per day in the restructuring segment, if you could talk about how many did you have at the end of '08 and what type of growth rate that might set you up for as you think about '09 here in your guidance?

We have in the first quarter so far we've opened up almost 160 new cases, so that's an unprecedented amount of new cases, and when you look at the way we look at the economy and the opportunities there, you've got the three pillars of the consumer confidence really under attack. Unemployment's growing to almost 9%. You've got retirement savings down 30%, 40%, 50% and then you've got home values declining 10% to 30% depending upon the market you're in. Unless we have the consumer come back, this economy is not going to correct itself. So we see this as a pretty long, deep recession at least through some time in 2010. Two other things I think you should focus on as well. We are only now just beginning to see the impact on this economic crisis on commercial real estate. It's happening quickly. It's happening in major metropolitan marketplaces, and the whole level people of commercial real estate paper is very, very high and has some obscure ties, so we think that will clearly yield new engagements. And then finally, as Jack said, there's about half a trillion dollars worth of structured finance that was put in place earlier in the decade on a very large prominent private equity led deals. Even though it was covenant like, it does have maturities and maturities commence this year and run for the next three years and that finance cannot be rolled over in this current credit market, so they would clearly be candidates for restructuring. Timothy McHugh – William Blair & Co.: Is it fair to assume maybe relative to the 33% organic growth rate in the fourth quarter that your guidance would assume a further acceleration in that business as we look to '09?

It's hard to take what is clearly extraordinary new engagement numbers and annualize them. I guess the caveat would be if it continues at that rate, then yes you're right. If it slows down it will be more in line with what our thinking was when we put the budget together at the end of last year. Timothy McHugh – William Blair & Co.: Just more broadly, can you talk about there's the low end and the high end of the guidance range, what may be some of the assumptions are that would take you up to the high end versus what would take you down to the low end and more so in terms of the revenue?

It's timing. I think when we put the budget together, we didn't anticipate some of these large cases breaking so quickly early in the year. We're early in most of them except for one, so we really just don't know how it's going to play out yet. I think from the view of currency, it's very difficult to predict. It's been going one way, and that's against us. We modeled using the currency numbers at the end of the year. We're already down, so the dollar has strengthened even more, so clearly a negative factor would be it's difficult to understand where the currencies are because it's such a fluctuating marketplace. So I guess it would be a combination of two things; if momentum that we're beginning to see continues, and some of the reach into some of these accounts, and then finally, FDD is difficult to model this year. They've done a tremendous job of being adroit in allocating capital markets talent into the crisis communication work, but they have such a high percentage already of large crisis communications cases, that it's difficult to forecast a lot of growth and clearly you can tell me better. We don't foresee very much if any capital markets work this year, so I think they would be another anchor to win Obviously the very good news we're getting in some of the other areas. Timothy McHugh – William Blair & Co.: The head count in technology seemed to be down quite a bit sequentially. What were you doing in the quarter there?

What we told you was that we were not going to attempt to integrate the Attenix acquisition until the beginning of this year mainly because we wanted to do the integration of two platforms. We have commenced the integration efforts of the acquisition into tech, and as a result you do, when you do these integrations, unfortunately there were redundancies that we had always planned to eliminate. And that's the main reason for it. Timothy McHugh – William Blair & Co.: Is that part of the margin lift you would expect for '09?

I think the margin will primarily come from, we'll get a little bit certainly some of the integration expenses that are non recurring will burn off over the next two to three quarters, so that will influence margin. We think the main increase to margin will be somewhat of a slow down in the R&D spend towards the back end and bigger impact from the larger assignments that we're getting.

Your next question comes from Tobey Summer – SunTrust Robinson. Tobey Summer – SunTrust Robinson: Stepping back and looking at the sequence of the business, judging from what you're saying it looks like corp restructuring has a multi year tailwind, and I'm just wondering from your perspective if there's going to be an opportunity where we're going to have a period of time where restructuring corp is still going kind of full boar, and some of the pro cyclical elements of your business could actually start performing better as well.

I think probably the last time we went through the cycles from our perspective, the good caveat that we think this restructuring market has a lot of legs to it. This is, we're in such a jackpot right now that our professionals are seeing this as a five year run. Typically, it takes longer for the collateral damage that you would experience in ECON and in FLC take a little longer, so you would think that that we're still seeing litigation now that dates back to the 2001/2002. So we would think that maybe two years out that you would have the beginning of those segments clicking. Technology, restructuring, and FLC clicking on all their cylinders together at the same time. FD has returned to its glory days of last year. We've tended a little bit on the capital markets, but there they will be increasing their market share. In terms of our ECON, they seem to be, they are beneficiaries of the litigation phase for sure there and they would also be the beneficiary of continued M&A type work. So I think that there's a, we have a platform that's put together to take care of periods like this where there's a real imbalance on what the economy is doing, but when we have a period where funding returns, where you can actually get restructuring done, you still have to do the restructuring and where the litigation starts to follow helps out. Even Enron and others, that only wrapped up last year. I think you're looking at a pretty good five year run for FTI if not longer. Tobey Summer – SunTrust Robinson: I wanted to ask a specific question with commercial real estate issues maybe coming to the fore, how your real estate business is doing and if there's opportunity for liquefaction of some investments. Maybe you could give us a thought for what Sovereign Funds may be thinking at this stage.

It's staring to pick up. Without a doubt it's doing very well now over in Europe. It's been one of our best cross sell opportunities in combination with the restructuring people as well as the FD people. We've won some very big assignments in the Middle East in partnering with some of the other groups. I think we're now up to three or four assignments in the Gulf area, Saudi Arabia. We won some large assignments in Dublin, as you're probably well aware. Commercial real estate has been one of the major drags on their economy. I think they're being viewed by some of the key people in Ireland as a very valuable resource and potentially navigating Ireland's economy out of some of these messes.

We have the SMG acquisition working closely and being integrated into the corporate finance practice. Our corporate finance professionals are really the guys that drive the bank negotiations, but we can bring in the real estate expertise from the SMG acquisition to really provide valuation and all the other components that are necessary in the commercial real estate debacle. That's really just beginning. That's the news that I think we're going to be reading about over the next six months, but to date you haven't seen the big ones. You've seen some of the industries like the casino's collapsing and a lot of the large resorts really under stresses, tourism and vacation spend is down and dropping. So stay tuned for a lot of real estate work outs in '09 and 2010.

SMG has a unique position in the REIT world. They have a very broad client base there number one, and an experienced base so as each come under pressure in a lot of their investments, they're uniquely positioned to help the REIT's handle some of those problems.

And there are some REIT's that have cash that they want to invest so SMG would be the first call there to help them structure the deals and value the acquisitions. Tobey Summer – SunTrust Robinson: Am I right in thinking that from a margin perspective the last several quarters, SMG probably has underperformed its historical margin and perhaps looking out over the next year or two, there's an opportunity to go back to that margin with success?

That's the plan. With the M&A down, that's the largest part of their margin we would expect going forward.

Your next question comes from David Gold – Sidoti & Co. David Gold – Sidoti & Co.: On resource growth, or the 14% head count you spoke a little bit about adding corporate finance and economic consulting, but curious if you can give a little bit more color as to where we should look for the head count adds to be weighted towards. And then, coupled with that utilization at the corporate finance practice presumably still weak, some room for progress, so pressed with margins there, but could we expect that some of that would be from higher utilization near term?

Utilization is increasing with the increasing pace of business. I remember fourth quarter, we digest a lot of our new hires from the universities that come in late third quarter, so our margin was up, utilization was down a little bit, and that was again mainly SMG because of the real estate market, and two just digesting all these new entries. So utilization will increase as a result of increasing momentum.

As far as adds, we're going to be adding across all the practices. Notwithstanding in 2008 we had a slower FLC overall practice, there are pockets within FLC as Jack mentioned that did extremely well, even in 2008 that we would expect to go forward to 2009. As Dennis mentioned, the margin expansion in corp is possible with the high utilization. If we ended the year at around 75%, there's clearly room to increase that utilization, and with the younger staff that we're brining on, our margin rates are the highest at the lower level versus the senior level professionals. David Gold – Sidoti & Co.: If we backtrack a little bit, you said no significant success fees in the fourth quarter and some margin potential in that business. How high do we think the margin could get there?

I think what we said was large success fees are becoming standard operating procedure on the creditor side and the big creditor cases, they're the accepted way of doing business which helps the creditors keep their monthly fees at a reasonable level and we get paid sharing in their success. I think there were, but I think we anticipate them throughout the year in these types of matters. So there are those. They will be a permanent back ion to the margin and I think that we're seeing those cases and the others, pretty healthy margins. So I don't think it's a huge margin expansion from where they were in the fourth quarter, but they have every capability of sustaining that type of margin.

We clearly had more success fees in 2008 and they're predominantly in the corporate finance practice and the restructuring practice and the health care practice. And the larger the cases, and hopefully the cases in 2009 and forward will be larger, the more opportunities in both company side and creditor side there will be for us to get success fees or transaction fees. David Gold – Sidoti & Co.: With cash building, you've always been good about giving us a little bit of a look as to what areas you might want to build in if the right acquisition came along.

Not to be facetious, but I don't mind building cash right now. It's a tough world out there as we're seeing four times a day. But in all seriousness, we're looking at, we have an incredible opportunity to hire right now, and that's one of the areas where we get our biggest bang for the buck, and so I think that we would put a portion of that aside for signing bonuses. We would put in terms of, we still are looking to I think it's critical that we move onto the continent from London in both the economic and consulting and the restructuring businesses, and I think we're looking to expand our domain expertise. ' When you look at the CXO acquisition where we picked up great capability in terms of being restructuring officers plus domain expertise in the telecom and media area, that's exactly the kind of thing we'd like to be doing; small bite size things like that ,and in no hurry as both the prices and the people seem to be coming our way.

I think also we're clearly building out our channel distribution in Asia. We're very aggressively looking at opportunities in Hong Kong, mainland China, Korea and in Australia. We've made numerous acquisitions out there over the last 18 months and we're in conversations with other people that would possibly like to join us.

Your next question comes from Scott Schneegerger – Oppenheimer. Scott Schneegerger – Oppenheimer: Branding a strong initiative for you this coming year. How variable a cost is that for you? Is that something where you can accelerate and decelerate as revenues go? And also is you could discuss is that more of an overall corporate push or is it done on a segment by segment basis?

The answer to your question is yes, we have complete flexibility in the way we're managing the program so we can accelerate and decelerate depending each week, each month. There's complete flexibility built into the plan. As you've seen it's spread across all of our businesses, across all of our platforms and all our geographies, so we have a lot of flexibility in there. We will manage that program as we should with any expense on an ongoing basis quarter by quarter. And the second part of your question? Scott Schneegerger – Oppenheimer: Is it a corporate wide initiative, meaning the FCI brand or is it more of a segment by segment brand initiative.

It's a corporate wide initiative with two different aspects to it. There's When the Game Changes, and also the Company Behind the Headlines. One is related to brand building around some of our sports activation in golf and equestrian sports and in baseball and a number of other places. The second is in leadership which is where we use the Behind the Headlines. So we have an overall corporate theme and approach to the campaign and each of the segments then has a tailored usage of those themes depending on the application. So we have a full suite of materials and initiatives that apply both on a corporate level and then on a segment by segment basis.

To be clear, this is a migration from brands and segments into one FTI. We think that as we said, we don't mean to be presumptuous, but this is an opportunity to separate some of the platform we have which is global and which has the diverse offerings. This is a change to separate ourselves from being a parochial U.S. company to really competing with the bigger brands in the world, and that's every intention we have is to do that. Scott Schneegerger – Oppenheimer: In tech consulting, you allude to some competitive pricing but at different levels of the business and you mentioned that at the start to '09 you see some large initiatives where you are very competitive. How many others can compete with you at the high end? And if you could elaborate a little bit more on the pricing pressure.

Pricing pressure again tends to be, smaller deals tend to be more price sensitive. I don't think tech buys are any different than a lot of other things and the more complex it is, the less people are concerned about price, and the more complex it is, and the larger dollars involved, there tends to be a lot more enterprise risk, so you have a risk management issue that's involved as well as a pricing issue. As clearly as you move up the chain of complexity, of geography, of risk, the pricing pressure tends to abate. So it's clearly at the lower end. It's a lot of smaller companies coming in trying to buy trial or mind share. A lot of them won't make it. A lot of them need the trial or mind share in order to get their next round of funding and so clearly we expect that to continue but it doesn't really do so at the upper end. I think that technology, as you're well aware, goes through cycles where there's introduction, there's development, there's new development and you see pricing pressure be sustained at the low end. We don't think anything is going to be different here. We think the low end of the continuum will have continued pricing pressure. The upper end will trade at more of a premium. The more complex jobs that Jack referred to clearly are very demanding. I'm not going to arrogant enough to say that we're the only one that could do it, but I think the fact that we seem to be getting almost all of them to our knowledge, says that there are a lot of people out that think we're the first people to go to.

That's the billion dollar questions, is who can compete with us at this level. The two largest cases we have in technology last year came from cleaning up messes that they tried to go to a low cost competitor. So I think that, we don't know yet who can compete with us. We're having a good sampling now because there are more entrants than there were last year at this time, and they're all going to vying for it. But we think that we can charge a fair price for us, because we really are a technology company, we're not just harnessing a few technological tools, so we believe that we'll be able to continue to compete with an edge for those big cases. Operator Your next question comes from William Sutherland – Boenning & Scattergood. William Sutherland – Boenning & Scattergood: The economics group had a very nice operating for the quarter. Obviously the rates look very strong but utilization was actually not as strong. I'm just kind of curious about the sustainability of that margin.

I think the margin is sustainable. I think Jack mentioned to you before that it was like on January 20, somebody flipped a switch and I think a lot of pent up activity at Justice and the FTC was released. I don't believe it was the Democrats going in and creating it. I think the activity. So it's a broad range of very high profile clients. It's a wide variety of anti-competition type of investigations, subpoenas, pricing collusion, competition. I think that the thing is we will add capacity in that group. As you add capacity, certainly you could see just digesting the capacity could impact you margins downward slightly, but it will be more than offset by the additional capacity going forward, so we're looking for the group to have a very good year, not only here but as Jack said, in Europe. William Sutherland – Boenning & Scattergood: I was just curious about that 30% margin. I had not seen that before and didn't know whether to extrapolate on that or not.

We've never entered a period like this where we had both a strong global affairs business as we have in communications and the economic fire power that we have in the ECON combined. And I think there you also see the opportunity for some fixed priced projects. That's going to be in this world where you're changing not only administrations, but you're changing as some people warn, a way of life. You're going to see that really be something that can also help add fire to those margins as well.

I think in fairness, we would plan that the division would see historic margins, not the fourth quarter margin over the year, so we're happy with the fourth quarter. Nothing has happened that would change our mind on the trajectory of the division, but in our planning and our forecasting we pretty much used a traditional margin on that business to forecast the year and that's very largely dependent on mix because the higher level margins are lower and they seem to have the highest utilization. We also put in a price increase at the end of the September that we've started to feel the benefit of that in the fourth quarter. William Sutherland – Boenning & Scattergood: That was another question I had. So the price was economic group specific or did it apply to other groups?

No, it was economic group specific. William Sutherland – Boenning & Scattergood: And pricing plans this year?

It depends on the practices, but we usually have price increases of about 6%, 7% to 8%.

And when we're back to a traditional client and we introduce those, they are a part of the January/February in some cases where we have longer term arrangements, they kind of bleed in over the year. Others we're able to have it right away. William Sutherland – Boenning & Scattergood: The amazing rate of new cases per day right now, what's kind of a typical world for those?

I would think going back a couple of years, if you got three or four cases a week or even a couple of weeks that was a good thing. This is just unprecedented. I don't want to make too much of it but it's just we continually try to give people that are very interested in what kind of the level of activity is, and I don't think any of our people who have been doing this a long, long time have seen something like this.

You next question comes from Kevin Wong – JMP Securities. Kevin Wong – JMP Securities: Looking at head count for both FLT and technology, both obviously down sequentially. Should we look at those as sort of low, sort of crop levels and will be building on those for those segments or for all the segments from here?

I think tech in the first half as we said was the beneficiary of extraordinarily large cases last year, so to a certain extent you're seeing a little bit of normalcy. I think those would be about the trough levels. As Jack said, we expect to see sequential growth going forward, that there's nothing that we see in FLC or tech that would say we shouldn't see sequential growth on a segment basis from them.

We consciously managed down FLC's head count as we saw the third quarter and the fourth quarter activity slow down, so we can flex up and flex down the head count depending upon the volume that we see coming in.

We're actively looking at those areas now because the pattern is becoming clearer as to where we think the insurance area is going to be a vibrant issue coming up, obviously from today's news. We look at the investigations area which has to be that way, forensic accounting, looking at some of the fraud areas and that kind of thing. So we're out activity hiring now, so I think your analysis of that as a trough is probably right. And IP is another big area where we've got plans to expand significantly. Kevin Wong – JMP Securities: Also looking at bill rates, you obviously just had a price increase. For forensic litigation, I mean at least in the lawyer role, there seems to be a lot more pricing pressure coming in. Would you expect to be able to hold your rates around these levels or is there going to be some pressure on those rates. What's your thoughts on that?

It depends on the case. Some of the smaller cases, you get some fee pressures, but we're not experiencing significant pressure where we thing we're going to be reducing our rates, and we hold our rates pretty fast. And as the larger cases roll in, there's a lot less fee pressure. Kevin Wong – JMP Securities: So your position is helping you hold onto that?

We didn't forecast for decreasing rates in that area. We haven't seen that kind of pressure at all. Kevin Wong – JMP Securities: On the restructuring, just a lingering issue, but the finance issue, had that started to become any kind of an issue for you at all as far as being able to get good financing if not forcing people to liquidations for restructuring. What's happening there?

There is good financing available. Certainly it's not at the level it's been historically, but if you look at the credit worthiness of the borrowers, that's really dropped. So you can't provide funding to anybody that's so far under water that there's no surety that the funder is going to get repaid in full, which historically is one of the safest loans you can make. And you've got defensive dips that are going to continue to happen. Banks are going to have to step up and finance operations either to get a restructuring accomplished or to liquidate in an orderly fashion where they can maximize their recovery on their collateral. The dip in financing doesn't really have a significant impact on us. We've got big cases that are liquidations. We've got large cases that are restructuring. One way or the other, the companies that have the operational problems, that's not going to change by whether or not there's financing available. If you look at the automotive industry, we've all heard a lot about it, the government's going to have to step in and back stop some of the dip lending that's going to be necessary, not only the big three but add all the suppliers to the big three.

Somebody has introduced to the mix the concept that if we work on a case and it ends up going to liquidation, that's it's less work or less of an impact to us than if it goes into a restructuring and I'd like to disabuse people. What you have is lenders and other equity players who have tremendous stakes in these things that want to get the maximum for those whether it's through a restructuring or whether in the sorry circumstance it has to be liquidation. That's a lot of work. Sometimes it's harder in a liquidation scenario, because you're not just talking small retail things where what you do is sell off a rack of suits. We're talking about people that operating subsidiaries, have major operations around the world. That's a tremendous amount of work to do the cash flows from that to figure out how you can maximize values and all that. So I'd just like to disabuse people that that is something that is a major concern for us.

And it could be a higher likelihood of litigation activity in liquidation so the more opportunities to cross sell the forensic practice into the corporate finance practices. Kevin Wong – JMP Securities: With that, if there was a pick up in liquidation versus restructuring, would that change the length of the contract where it would be shortened versus having multiple years where you're trying to bring it back around to come off life support?

It depends when they decide to pull the plug and go liquidation. If it's a pre-packaged liquidation, there will be a lot of work because you still have to get through the Chapter 11, but it would be a shorter period of time. The complexity issue really drives it. I think no one would argue that Lehman Brothers is anything but a liquidation, yet that's probably going to take three years start to finish to effectuate. So I think complex, the bigger they are even if its straight liquidation, it's very complex. It's a lot of work and you still have to maximize the value on the assets on behalf of the constituents as Jack said. Kevin Wong – JMP Securities: With economic consulting you talked about demand for consulting on strategic M&A. Is that a positive reflection, positive signal as far as economy. A lot of companies lining up getting ready to purchase companies out there because they're cheap and maybe just holding off to a certain period?

No. I would say it's more the distressed nature of a lot of the micro markets has caused some competitors to be extremely weak. The stronger competitors in the market see it as an opportunity to perhaps consolidate in a regulatory environment that's influenced by economic stresses to where they'll let deals go through that they normally might turn around and take objection to in order to save jobs, save companies, save positioning. I think unfortunately a lot of it is driven by companies under stress that need to find a strategic partner to stay alive.

Speaking on behalf of 3,700 employees, I don't think we've seen many positive signs of anything yet. It's pretty ugly out there, and we're in a pretty good position to see. Kevin Wong – JMP Securities: It sounds like more distressed companies seeking more than people out there figuring out the targets of who to pick up.

I think there are clearly companies out there targeting distressed companies. I didn't want to sound like it was one way. But I think the catalyst is that you have competitors under stress and a regulatory group that is conflicted both here and in Europe of trying to look at the competitive or anti-competitive deals versus trying to preserve jobs.

It's not all to distressed companies trying to get together to save the ramps. These are healthy companies looking at opportunities so to that extent it is good that they're thinking that way.

There are no further questions. At this time I would like to turn the conference back over to management for any closing remarks.

Thank you all for joining us. As you can see we're optimistic about the prospect for our company in 2009. Hope we can do some good while we're doing well and look forward to joining with you again when we report our first quarter results. Thank you.