FTI Consulting Brand Guidelines: An Annapolis Warehouse of 1982 & Forensic Technologies

Two engineers, a warehouse and the jury box.

FTI Consulting began in 1982 as Forensic Technologies International. English Wikipedia names its founders as two engineers, Joseph Reynolds and Daniel Luczak, who set it up to provide expert witnesses for litigation and visual presentations that explained complex technical issues to juries. The company’s own history says the pair started in a small warehouse in Annapolis, Maryland, and built computer models to help courtroom staff and jurors follow the technical side of a case.

The early work was engineering investigation. The company says the State of Illinois hired it in 1988 to find the cause of a fire at a central telephone office, and that a construction-industry product-defect case in 1989 raised its standing in technical investigations and litigation services. Luczak served as chairman from 1992 to 1998, English Wikipedia says.

In May 1996 the company went public on NASDAQ under the ticker FTIC; English Wikipedia and the company both describe it as one of the first litigation-support companies to be publicly traded. In 1998 Forensic Technologies International changed its name to FTI Consulting, keeping the three initials it had used as a ticker. The two sources differ on the next listing: English Wikipedia says the shares began trading on the New York Stock Exchange as FCN in 1999, while the company’s timeline gives 2001.

After the renaming, English Wikipedia says, the business turned increasingly to what it quotes as “financial surgery on troubled companies,” through bankruptcy proceedings or workouts with creditors. The company says that in 1998 alone it bought S.E.A., Klick, Kent & Allen and Kahn Consulting, a turnaround and forensic-accounting practice.

Built by acquisition, segment by segment.

FTI grew largely by buying practices from larger firms. In 2002 it bought the US business recovery services division of PricewaterhouseCoopers, which English Wikipedia describes as at the time the largest provider of bankruptcy, turnaround and restructuring services in the United States; the company says it then worked on the Enron, WorldCom and Adelphia bankruptcy cases. In 2003 it added the dispute advisory services of KPMG and the Chicago economic consultancy Lexecon, whose name lives on in the subsidiary Compass Lexecon.

Each purchase became a line of business. The 2006 acquisition of the London communications consultancy Financial Dynamics founded what is now the Strategic Communications segment, English Wikipedia and the company both say; the same year the company announced Technology as a segment, built partly on the Ringtail e-discovery software it had bought in 2005. English Wikipedia lists the firm’s areas today as corporate finance and restructuring, economic consulting, forensic and litigation consulting, strategic communications, technology and strategy consulting.

Geography followed the same pattern. English Wikipedia records expansion into Latin America in 2007, Hong Kong in 2010 and Australia in 2012 through a KordaMentha practice in Queensland; the company adds parts of LECG’s international arbitration business in 2011, BOLD in the Netherlands in 2022 and Madison Consulting Group in 2024, while English Wikipedia notes Andersch in Germany in 2019. In January 2014 Steven H. Gunby became president and chief executive, both sources say; the same month, English Wikipedia notes, FTI bought TLG Partners of London, which produced a series of annual thought-leader indexes.

Restructuring remains the public face of the firm. English Wikipedia says that in 2015 the trade publication The Deal named FTI the top restructuring adviser to distressed companies, and that as of January 2020 it had the largest restructuring business in the US. In November 2026, RNZ reported, FTI Consulting was appointed receiver of the Australian department-store chain David Jones, alongside administrators McGrathNicol, with stores continuing to trade under the receivers’ control.

How consultancies present themselves.

Management consultancies sell advice, so their brands have to stand in for something a client cannot hold. Most begin with a name — often a founder’s surname, a set of initials or a coined word — set as a confident wordmark, and pair it with one signature colour that runs from the website to the cover of every report. The visual system is usually restrained, leaving the work itself to carry the message.

Much of that work is published. Firms put out thought-leadership articles, surveys and recurring indexes, along with yearly outlooks on trends in a sector; many also run podcasts and newsletters. Their websites are organised around industry pages and capability pages, so that a hospital chief, a utility executive or a private-equity partner can find the team that speaks to them.

Case studies are a staple, but clients are often anonymised: a “global insurer” or a “regional health system” rather than a named company, with the results stated as outcomes. Alongside them sit the signals of scale and standing that firms like to show — office maps, rankings and awards from business magazines, and partnerships with technology companies.

The people side is just as visible. Large consultancies keep alumni networks for former staff, many of whom go on to become clients, and their careers pages explain the hiring process in detail, often with guides to the case interview. Many also publish annual impact or responsibility reports. The guides that follow look at how individual firms handle these conventions, and where their own stories — origins, owners and names — set them apart.

Three initials kept from a longer name.

The FTI name is a survival of the original one: three initials from Forensic Technologies International, kept as the firm moved from technical evidence into finance, economics and communications. English Wikipedia describes FTI Consulting as one of the largest financial consulting firms worldwide, headquartered in Washington, D.C., with more than 7,700 staff in 31 countries; the company’s own site gives more than 8,100 employees in 32 countries and territories. The company also says it worked on the Lehman Brothers and General Motors restructurings in 2009.

Its communications arm has drawn press scrutiny. In 2020 The New York Times reported on FTI’s work for fossil-fuel industry clients, including organisations and websites that, the newspaper reported, were made to appear to represent grass-roots support, English Wikipedia says. In 2023 the Japanese broadcaster NHK reported that the firm’s Japan office had prepared a list of reporters not to call on at a press conference it was managing for the talent agency Johnny & Associates; FTI acknowledged the list and said its press-conference approach had been confirmed with the agency, English Wikipedia records.

For a design guide, FTI Consulting shows how a firm can grow far beyond its first trade and still keep the initials of its old name as the brand. Compare Alvarez & Marsal, a fellow restructuring adviser, and PwC, whose recovery practice FTI bought in 2002. For this guide we use a harbour blue, a pale grey and a sea-green accent with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep FTI Consulting’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.