Good afternoon. My name is Christie and I will be your conference facilitator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Crawford & Company First Quarter 2008 Earnings Release Conference Call. In conjunction with this call, a supplementary financial presentation is available on our website at www.crawfordandcompany.com under the Investor Relations section. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question-and-answer period. (Operator Instructions). As a reminder ladies and gentlemen this conference is being recorded today, Monday, May 5, 2008. Some of the matters to be discussed in this conference call and in the supplementary financial presentation may include forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties including statements regarding our availability to pay dividends in the future. The company’s actual results achieved in future quarters could differ materially from the results that may be implied by such forward-looking statements. The company undertakes no obligation to publicly release revisions to any forward-looking statements made in this conference call to reflect events or circumstances occurring after the date of the call or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events. For a complete discussion regarding factors which could affect the company’s financial performance, please refer to the company’s Form 10-K for year ended December 31st, 2007 filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, particularly the information under the headings “Business Risk Factors, Legal Proceedings and Management's Division and Analysis of Financial Conditions and Results of Operations.” This presentation also includes certain non-GAAP financial measures as defined under SEC rules. As required a reconciliation is provided for those measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures, which is available on our website at www.crawfordandcompany.com\quarterly releases. I would now like to introduce Mr. Jeffrey Bowman, President and Chief Executive Officer of Crawford and Company. Mr. Bowman, you may begin your conference.

Thank you. A very warm welcome to our investors, clients and employees this afternoon for a discussion of our first quarter results and expectations for 2008. I am Jeffrey Bowman, President and CEO, Crawford and Company. Joining me from the global executive management team this afternoon are Bruce Swain, our CFO; and Allen Nelson, our General Counsel and Chief Administrative Officer. We have today reported on the first quarter results for 2008; you will have received the press release this morning. We released it earlier than normal to give our shareholders more time to review our performance. In addition, we are providing a financial presentation, which is downloadable from our website. I am continually encouraged by the global potential that we have in front of us in all of our business units and I am pleased with the progress we have made in the first quarter. But we still have a great deal of work to do in order to execute on the potential we see. So let me first overview the strategies and performance of the first quarter. On my call with you in the last quarter, I began with a fact that globally insurance is a growth business and providing an independent quality driven local regional or global claim service is crucial to our client’s business proposition. Crawford and Company is well positioned to take advantage of the business opportunities and revenue growth potential associated with those propositions. Internally, we are acting with a sense of urgency within the organization, that aligns us from the bottom-up, allowing us to connect all of our units with the company and the clients and enable us to build our organization. During the first quarter, the management team has worked hard to initiate and execute the plans we outlined 90 days ago,…

Okay. Companywide revenues before reimbursement increased by 4.9% in the 2008 first quarter to $255.5 million, from $243.6 million in the prior year’s first quarter. This increase is attributable to double digit organic growth from our international operations, which offset declines in revenues generated in our legal settlement administration, Broadspire and US Property & Casualty segments. Our pre-tax income totaled $13.7 million as compared to pre-tax income of $5.4 million we reported in last year’s first quarter. We recognized basic and fully diluted earnings per share of $0.18 for the current quarter, as compared to earnings per share of $0.07 in last year’s first quarter. First quarter 2007 earnings per share include $0.05 related to the gain on disposable assets as a result of the sale of our segregation services unit. Excluding this special credit, our earnings per share were up $0.16 on a comparable basis, over the $0.02 before special credits in the 2007 first quarter. The company’s selling, general, and administrative expenses or SG&A, totaled $50.6 million or 19.8% of revenues in the 2008 first quarter, decreasing $4.5 million from $55.1 million or 22.6% of revenue in the prior year quarter. SG&A costs associated with the Broadspire segment declined $1.6 million, reflecting a portion of the positive impact of acquisition-related synergies we generated. Excluding the effect of the Broadspire synergies, the remaining decline is primarily due to lower self insurance expense in the US and lower bad debt expense, in both the US and internationally driven by the partial recovery of a previously written-off bankrupt account in the US. Turning to operations, effective with the 2008 first quarter, the company realigned its internal reporting structure to include the results of its strategic warranty services business within its US Property & Casualty segment. This business was previously a component…

Thank you, sir. (Operator Instructions). Your first question comes from the line of Mark Hughes of SunTrust.

Thank you very much. A nice quarter.

Thank you, Mark.

Thanks Mark.

You had talked about, in the Broadspire segment perhaps some of your customers are looking for more traditional bundled relationships, or I guess within your pipeline which is pretty robust, that's one of the reasons why you are not closing any perhaps. Could you talk about that a little bit?

Yeah sure. Within the overall services, we are seeing a lot of activities on the RFPs coming in where they are looking for an all encompassing service coming out of the Broadspire operation, rather than really splitting it out into various other areas of products. And this is really a trend that we're seeing at this present moment.

All right. Any strategies for, I guess, filling out the offering to make it more attractive to those sort of clients?

Well I think, actually I think I might have misunderstood the question at the beginning. I mean, one of the downward pressures on Broadspire in terms of the challenges that we face in the market is looking at, given the soft market that exists today, and with insurance companies, they are offering bundled solutions to self-insured entities where the claims administration and the insurance is all wrapped into one product offering and you see that sometimes during a soft market. So that's one of the challenges in that market as we're exiting 2007 and entering 2008.

All right. Got you.

That's not to say, all clients self-administered are going to look to a fully insured program. I mean a lot of companies themselves administer. They like to self administer and they are going to keep doing that and they can still drive reductions in their overall cost of risk by separating the two. But it does create a bit of a headwind in the market in that business.

Got you. On GCG, nice uptick in the backlog. Is there a normal time period that that translates into revenue?

There is no real time period or so. It depends on the court taking the action to credit the class action and we are behooving to them on that.

And then, finally, the benefit from the recovery, I think, of the charged off receivable. Did you quantify that?

That was approximately $1.2 million.

Great. Thank you very much.

Okay. Thanks Mark.

(Operator Instructions). Your next question comes from the line of Carter Newbold of Rutabaga Capital.

Good afternoon.

Good afternoon Carter.

A couple of questions. One is, your year-over-year rate of capitalized software was up substantially, and I couldn't recall how that was running in the last couple of quarters as well as last year. But could you just remind me whether there's been any significant change in the way you're spending or that's driving that number?

There's not so much of significant change. You know, during 2007, we implemented the CMS2 system within our US Property & Casualty segment. And so that software had capital requirement associated with it. Within the Broadspire segment, we are in the final stages of our initial implementation of that system, that's on schedule for the fourth quarter of this year, and that has some increased capital expenditure associated with it, both for capitalized internal use software, but also for some of the back-end investment in servers and hardware.

So as you move towards that fourth quarter RiskTech, a full end limitation rollout, are we sort of seeing a peak in spending that will then back off a bit going into fiscal '09?

Well, the rollout of RiskTech is in phases and there are three primary operating systems within Broadspire that we are migrating on to the RiskTech platform. The first platform is one that was used predominantly by the acquired Broadspire entity and it was their main operating platform and that's the first to go on. And then we had to integrate the legacy Crawford systems, and then a smaller platform that Broadspire operated on that was from a legacy acquisition that they had undertaken that can be the early 2000. So I think we haven't put the capital expenditure, budget or projection together for 2009 but I suspect that we'll see a comparable amount in 2009 and then dropping off from there.

Okay. I wonder if you could also update us on, there was some reasonably lengthy discussion, I believe, last quarter about the manner in which the total leverage ratio governed your ability to pay a dividend. I think you said you were 3.1 at year end, you just finished an outstanding quarter. Can you tell us what the LTM number is there and are you now at least by the banks reckoning, able to pay a dividend?

Yeah, under our credit facility, we've got a few requirements that we have to make in order to pay a dividend and the leverage ratio is cheap among them. At the end of the year, you are right, we ended up at 3.1 to 1 and we have to be under 3.0 to 1 on a trailing 12 month basis. At the end of the first quarter, we were at 2.9 to 1 so we were under the 3.0 to 1 requirement that we had under the credit agreement. I mean, the management is supportive of a paying a dividend in the future. But it’s the decision that's ultimately undertaken by the board, it’s the one that they the evaluate each quarter and --

But to just understand, is the ball now in the Board's court to speak of and there is no bank provision on a dividend at this point.

There is not a bank provision on a dividend, and it matters that’s decision of the Board.

Okay great. I guess just one more question to talk, sort of the strengths of the business. I too was hoping for a specific disclosure on the size of the receivable recovery and given how fantastic the quarter was, I was expecting actually that-that recovery might have been a fairly large, a substantially larger number than it was. If backing that out and calling what you did in the first quarter, less the run-rate and given the normal seasonal patterns of your business. It just looks like you are going to stomp your full year guidance. Is there a caution reflected there just related to the macroeconomy or is there something else of work we should be (inaudible)?

Yeah could you just repeat the first part of the question, Carter?

You had a great quarter; I thought maybe a more substantial part of its performance would be related to this kind of onetime AR recovery. But now that you gave us that number of $1.2 million, I think, at least from my perspective, I would still say the business is running much more strongly and I thought it would at this point in the year and the extent to which you moved your guidance was fairly modest?

Okay. I mean the business in all of the segments at this moment, we put in reductions of costs. We are beginning to see the benefits of the implementation of technology play a part in the overall results that are coming in. Obviously the streamlining of both systems has effectively enabled us to take out some of the administration cost. That’s one of the reasons we are saying SG&A cost reduced within the organization. We've realized most of those initial SG&A costs and our overall priority is for key account management to start pushing and increase the revenue of the organization in each of the business unit. I mean, from that perspective, we are not giving, really -- it's my first quarter as CEO and I am taking a fairly conservative approach as we go through the balance of the year. I think at the end of the second quarter, if the results continue on the way they are, we will look very seriously at the guidance we have been giving. But, I feel comfortable with what we have actually put out at this particular moment.

Fair enough, thanks very much.

Thank you, Carter. Operator (Operator Instructions). There are no further questions at this time. Gentlemen, do you have any closing remarks?

Yes, thank you. I would like to thank everyone for joining us this afternoon. I hope to see many of you as possible at the annual meeting, which takes place tomorrow afternoon here in the home office in Atlanta. Thanks very much for participating, it's greatly appreciated and good luck.

Thank you once again for participating in today's conference call. You may now disconnect.