Good day and welcome everyone to CRA International's fourth quarter and year-end 2008 conference call. (Operator Instructions) With us today are CRA's President and Chief Executive Officer, Jim Burrows, Chief Operating Officer, Paul Maleh, and Chief Financial Officer, Wayne Mackey. At this time for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to Mr. Mackey. Please go ahead, sir.

Statements made during this conference call concerning the future business, operating results, estimated cost savings and financial condition of the company and statements using the terms anticipates, believes, expects, should or similar expressions are forward-looking statements as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are based upon management's current expectations and are subject to a number of factors and uncertainties. Information contained in these forward-looking statements is inherently uncertain, and actual performance and results may differ materially due to many important factors. Such factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from any forward-looking statements made by the company are included in the company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and in today’s news release which is posted on the company’s website. The company cannot guarantee any future results, levels of activity, performance, or achievement. The company undertakes no obligation to update any of its forward-looking statements after the date of this call. Let me remind everyone that CRA’s fiscal year typically operates on 13-four week cycles producing unequal quarters in terms of length. Q1, Q2, and Q4 are typically 12 weeks in length with Q3 being a 16-week quarter. However the fourth quarter we just completed was a 13-week quarter and fiscal 2008 consists of 53 weeks. Fifty-three week years happen about every six years.

Thanks Wayne and thank you everyone for joining us today. I also want to welcome Paul Maleh to our call today. As we announced in October we promoted Paul to the President and Chief Operating Officer and tasked with creating greater efficiency within our organization and delivering more innovation to our clients. Paul will be speaking to you about his priorities later on the call. First as a result of the charges we took in the quarter I encourage everyone to refer to today’s news release for full reconciliation of GAAP revenue, net income, and earnings per share to non-GAAP revenue, net income and earnings per share. We have a number of factors that effected our results for the quarter including various restructuring initiatives, purchase of convertible bonds, and the consolidation of the results of our NeuCo subsidiary for which CRA became the majority owner again in the fourth quarter. As outlined in today’s news release total revenue for the fourth quarter of 2008, 13-week period ended November 29, 2008 was $85.6 million, a decline of $13.1 million from the fourth quarter of 2007. For a clear comparison of how we performed in Q4 there are four factors to take into consideration. First revenues dropped by approximately $5 million as the result of the divestments during 2008 of lines of business and geographies. Second the strengthening of the US dollar in Q4 lowered our foreign currency denominated revenue. Using last year’s exchange rates our foreign currency denominated revenue this quarter would have been approximately $3 million higher. Third the year-over-year decline in client reimbursables which are essentially pass through expenses that carry little to no margins was approximately $2.7 million. Fourth results for the fourth quarter included an additional week of revenue compared to the same period of fiscal 2007.…

Thanks Jim, briefly recapping Q4 results, GAAP revenue declined 13% to $85.6 million compared to $98.7 million for fourth quarter of fiscal 2007. As Jim mentioned besides of the difficult economic environment there are a few factors that impacted that our decrease in revenue as compared to the fourth quarter of last year which included the practices we divested of which contributed approximately $5.0 million, foreign exchange effects of approximately $3 million, and a decrease in reimbursables of approximately $2.7 million. However revenue was benefited by the fact that the quarter was 13 weeks versus 12 weeks for the prior year. The reconsolidation of NeuCo added about $800,000 to our Q4 GAAP revenue. One note on reimbursables, on a percentage basis reimbursables dropped to 12.2% of revenue compared to 13.4% of revenue in Q4 of 2007. As described in our press release our GAAP results for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2008 reflect $4.9 million related to restructuring costs that included employee separation costs attributed to a reduction in consulting staff, office closure costs in Austin, Dallas, and Melbourne, reducing space in Houston, and exiting from our capital projects and legal business consulting practices. Annual cost savings from those restructuring actions are expected to be approximately $11.5 million. Utilization in Q4 of this year was 69% compared to 74% for Q4 of 2007. Our GAAP results also included the impact of consolidating NeuCo as a majority owned subsidiary starting again during Q4. During the fourth quarter a NeuCo shareholder who was unrelated to CRA sold its shares back to NeuCo. This transaction resulted in CRA’s ownership percentage increasing to approximately 50% and requiring us to once again consolidate NeuCo into our financial results beginning in the fourth quarter. NeuCo is not a strategic investment [of] CRA. Its operations have been…

Thanks Wayne, in terms of our outlook I’d like to echo the comments made in our press release today. We have taken aggressive steps to position CRA to ride out the current recession and emerge as a strong competitor. Clearly this was a very challenging year for us but shedding our under performing assets and substantially lowering our cost structure during fiscal 2008 will enable us to operate more efficiently and help us to more rapidly return to profitable growth as our markets improve. We remain one of the most recognized [inaudible] brands within our fields of expertise. Our pipeline of activity particularly within our litigation practices was healthy in the fourth quarter and we continue to expect further rebound in our Middle East revenues. We believe the global economic slowdown and the global financial crisis will ultimately lead to substantial litigation assignments for CRA. As I mentioned we are already retained on many of what we expect to be the largest cases. With this second wave of restructuring now completed, our focus going forward will be on improving utilization, improving margins, controlling headcount and overhead costs, and continuing to generate business within our core segments. We plan to be very conservative in recruiting with the aim of hiring only for need or to increase revenue-generating capability. With normal turnover and delayed impacts of the actions we took in Q4, Q1 headcount is likely to decline by 1% to 3%. We are continuing to recruit with the expectation that headcount will start to trend up as the year progresses and that it will end the year above the current level. We will make decisions on headcount growth later in the year based on our utilization trends and revenue opportunities. We continue to target an improvement over time in utilization, our long-term target in the high 70’s, but significant strides in this direction will be difficult in the short-run because of the mixed economic climate. Operationally we have a number of initiatives under way to control expenses and maximize efficiencies. Before we open the call up for questions, I wanted to turn the call over to Paul Maleh on these topics. Just over two months ago the company took a significant step by creating a new position at CRA, Chief Operating Officer. The position has been structured to focus on three critical areas, revenue growth, enhancing our relationships with clients, and managing our internal operations. Paul Maleh, and Executive Vice President at CRA and the leader of the finance platform was selected to fill this important role. I would like to formally introduce him to you and to provide him the opportunity to say a few words.

Thank you Jim and thank you for the opportunity to speak at today’s call. I’m excited about my new role and look forward to helping the company in these critical areas. These are challenging times. The economic downturn is changing the way many will conduct business. It is therefore essential that we stay close to our clients, that we listen to them, and that we understand the pressures they are facing. We must then take this information and develop valued added service offerings that will meet our clients’ evolving needs. Enhancing client relationships will be a priority for me. I intend to launch a formal client satisfaction and client relationship review initiative at CRA. This will ensure that we’re actively soliciting input from our clients and responding to their needs. In the area of business development and marketing we will be enhancing our corporate brand this year with a new marketing campaign which will differentiate us and provide a broader view of the firm’s capabilities. We will also be reintroducing the Charles River Associates name. For more then 40 years this name has been synonymous with our reputation as a leader in the litigation consulting industry and it is the name which so many continue to use when referring to us. We are also going to continue the efforts of our cost cutting strategic business processes [inaudible] of this program. We will continue to look for ways to streamline our administrative operations through improved systems and processes. I believe there is potential to further improve the services we provide our consultants which will in turn allow them to have more time to focus on my relationship management and business development. CRA is positioning itself for long-term growth. We have highly skilled and credentialed consultants, a unique combination of functional and industry expertise, a comprehensive service offering, and a commitment to keep a steady eye on our internal operations and expenses. With that I will now turn the call back to Jim.

Thanks Paul. Thanks everyone for listening this morning. We are now ready to take your questions.

(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from the line of James Janesky - Stifel Nicolaus

When you talk about in the release and your prepared comments about business slowing and clients being frozen, do you expect that that trend will continue into the first quarter of 2009 and at what point do you expect that the pipeline could start to open up.

It probably will extend into Q1. We do see some, we think that work will start ramping during the course of the year, some will start in Q1, some later. But we think that we’ll see a gradual improvement over time.

What do you think it will take the pipeline to become or projects to become unfrozen, do you expect a change in the administration to have an effect on that, do you expect that whenever the financial markets stabilize that the pipeline will, I’m just trying to get a sense of what you think it will take.

It depends on the areas. Basically what we’re talking about is some of our, its not every project, its some of the bigger engagements where the clients are sensitive to our rate of billing. In the litigation area I don’t think it’s a function of the administration right now and unless the financial situation deteriorates worse, I think we’ll just simply see as those litigations start to get hot we will be billing more. In the business consulting area we’ve had some fairly large engagements have been held off for various reasons but I think the climate is a factor. We expect to see that loosening up within Q1 and then getting better as the year go along. So we do see, I think that should give you a picture.

So I guess the message as we go into 2009 is that it will be a slow start that we could see improvement but that the margins year-over-year should get better both on the gross margin as well as the SG&A lines, is that correct?

Well to the extent that we get revenue growth, that should happen or if we get even realization growth through rates, if we hit those numbers it will.

Do you expect that in the first quarter at least that margins could hold up with the, in the gross margin line, this is on a non-GAAP basis by the way I’m looking at, do you think that the gross margins can hold around the 37% level?

As I said if we continue on the same revenue path and we get some rate improvement and we continue to get some cost savings, we should be able to hold to that or do better.

Your next question comes from the line of Andrew Fones - UBS

Finance I think you said was down more then 40% year-over-year and a large part of that was due to the reduction in scale and some projects you’re working on, can you explain the extent that these clients pulling back on ongoing projects due to the economic environment versus projects actually wrapping up.

The scaling back really is in this kind of economic environment our ultimate clients are really looking at sort of essential spend. So with the uncertainty of litigation timelines, there’s always an attempt to try to delay these expenditures. So the environment we’re in now has just pushed out projects into the horizon. With respect to the replacement of some large cases, we’ve had some large litigations that have settled and we have retentions on some newer litigations but we’re not at the revenue ramp rate that existed for the cases that have just ceased.

On the energy group I think you mentioned that there was some large new wins in the third quarter and obviously there was these delayed [inaudible] contracts, you had to bid on again, could you give us an update on the progress there.

No we don’t have to bid again, these are just delayed revenues so we’re hopeful going into the year that we’ll see an improvement.

On the expense side, should we expect a full impact of the cost savings in the first quarter, I think you said $11.5 million annualized.

Yes we should be able to see that run rate in Q1.

On the tax rate, the 41.5% is that a good rate to assume going forward.

That rate is a reasonable rate I think, it is driven heavily by of course the mix of profitability by jurisdiction but a rate somewhere in that vicinity is probably a reasonable one to use in your modeling.

Your next question comes from the line of Timothy McHugh - William Blair

The extra week of revenue do you have any sense the, we can get the revenue impact obviously by doing the math, would there be a margin impact that we should be aware of just from the [leverage] of fixed expenses here and did you do any math around that that you could help us with.

We didn’t do any real math around it but it really shouldn’t have changed things much. It was a week of additional revenue if you will, and a week of additional expenses so it wasn’t, it shouldn’t have any particular impact, and we didn’t really do any particular calculations around it.

On the cash flow you mentioned you’re not getting much of a return right now. You used it to buy back some of the bonds this quarter what would be your preference looking forward these next few quarters. Are you looking at acquisitions or looking to repurchase more bonds or go back to repurchasing stock as well.

We are considering that and if the price is attractive in terms of the bond price or a stock price, but certainly at this point probably bond price given where the stock price is, we may well be buyers.

Could you extrapolate a little bit on what you’re doing from a marketing perspective trying to get ahead of some of the potential demand that we see out there from litigation activity building up and regulatory activity, what type of things are you able to do right now to try and position yourself from a client basing role.

We are directly marketing to the people, the clients we see as impacted by these various financial crisis. We put together a team, we’re generating thought pieces, and we’re staying in contact with the clients and as I said, in the major cases, we have already been retained in many of them and our history is we usually get retained on a major case because there’s more then one party and not too many can provide these services and we’re one of the leaders. We anticipate that the major league litigation we’ll be directly involved in as these cases play out. Almost, obviously not all of them, but a very high percentage.

Your next question comes from the line of Unspecified Analyst – Deutsche Bank Unspecified Analyst – Deutsche Bank : I thought you mentioned that the demand for litigation was weak due to clients holding up projects, but you also cited a strong backlog for forensic accounting, I was wondering if the demand are somewhat tied to each other.

The demand for the forensic accounting work has been largely in the international arbitration space and not really tied to the ongoings of the financial crisis right now.

Your next question is a follow-up from the line of James Janesky - Stifel Nicolaus

What was the combination of depreciation and amortization and stock related compensation.

Let me get that information for you.

When you talk about being retained but the engagement hasn’t started, what are the clients saying it will take to start up the engagements and what major areas of focus are you being retained but you said the projects aren’t starting up in a meaningful way.

The typical situation is a major league firm usually is a big defendant, the types we work for, the big banks, the accounting firms, they retain us to work on the case that’s usually going to be on damage related issues but often the conversation goes until we get a better sense of how the case is progressing and get through the initial rounds of legal filings, why don’t you just get your feet wet but let’s not start any major projects. Its not tied to any specific milestone. When clients are less sensitive to the costs they may just hire us and say get to work. But we’re getting more of the, we want to hire you but let’s put off the major amount of work until we have a better sense of where the case is going.

And particularly with these large-scale litigations the legal team and the ultimate clients really want to put together their complete project team which includes the economic consultants, their being the premier provider is often times called early on in these cases. So we’ll get added on to the team just so they can have that composed but not necessarily start work until very later on. So we’re retained but its much more of a wait and see as to when work begins.

How has the significant decline in the price of oil effect it or do you think will effect your energy practice.

We don’t think there will be a major impact. There’s still a huge amount of work being contracted in the Middle East. If anything a lot of work we do will in fact be stimulated because much of what we’re doing is at least when we’re working with public sector clients there, helping them figure out how to transform their economies to be less dependent on oil and that’s even more of a concern now. So at $140 oil there are things that didn’t matter now things really do matter. So I don’t, we don’t see any impact at current levels of oil prices and on the commercial consulting side, again if anything the issues are more difficult for the clients because at $140 oil you don’t have to do a lot of analysis to figure out how to make money, $40 of oil is quite different. I don’t think at that level of oil prices will have any major downward effect on our demand.

Here are the numbers, depreciation and amortization for Q4 of 2008 was $2.2 and the stock compensation was $1.3 for Q4 of 2008. For depreciation and amortization its $2.4 million for Q4 of 2007 and $1.5 million for Q4 of 2007 on the stock compensation.

Your next question is a follow-up from the line of Andrew Fones - UBS

You’ve talked in the past about how vocal Obama has been regarding in his view has been the lack of regulation on the anti trust side. Now he’s got his new team in place, could you talk about in your opinion what the views are of some of the new people he’s put on this regulatory team and to what extent you think those people are going to be aggressive in pursuing regulatory and investigative actions.

I don’t think the appointments have been made down at the level that will directly effect us but its clear his administration based on what’s already been said is going to be enforcement oriented. On the merger side it means that mergers will probably get more scrutiny which means more work for us and on the litigation side the justice department will be bringing more cases. I think it can only be good for us.

If we could get some guidance on CapEx for this year please.

We haven’t given the information out. I don’t have it right here with me. I think I mentioned during the call what the numbers were for 2008. I don’t see a substantial change in 2009 relative to what it was in 2008 but I don’t have the numbers right here.

There are no additional questions at this time; I would like to turn it back over to management for any additional or closing comments.

Thanks everyone. We look forward to speaking with you on our first quarter fiscal 2009 conference call. This concludes today’s call.