Jonathan Orszag billed well over $1,000 an hour. FTI’s filings show it bought Lexecon in 2003 and COMPASS in 2006, then combined them into Compass Lexecon; in 2025 Econic Partners launched with Goldman Sachs Alternatives funding. This is the structural story the series has been circling around: what kind of business is expert-witness economics, and where does it belong.
The public record is strongest when it is read narrowly. FTI’s own investor materials show that a senior movement out of Compass Lexecon was material enough for management to discuss with shareholders; Econic’s own launch release shows that the new firm began with outside financing and a senior expert roster. The comparison below uses official-source evidence first.
At the top of the market, expert-witness economics is no longer a cottage industry, even if the comparison with banking or management consulting should be read as analogy rather than measured ranking. The product is still a named expert’s analysis and testimony. The business wrapped around that expert now has investors, succession plans, retention costs and listed-company earnings calls attached to it.
The question raised by the FTI–Orszag dispute, which played out across a three-year sequence of court filings and Financial Times reports between 2023 and 2025, is which corporate form fits this business. Is the expert best housed inside a diversified, publicly traded advisory group, the model FTI Consulting built over the two decades after it bought Lexecon? Or inside a private partnership, the model Orszag built at Econic Partners and that Ridyard, Bishop and Baker built at RBB in London 23 years earlier? The series has been circling this question. The FTI–Orszag fight makes it unusually public.
The narrow structural argument does not require a private quote. Unlike investment banking, where the franchise often sits in the institution’s relationships with chief executives and boards, and unlike management consulting, where the franchise sits in a methodology and a brand, the expert-witness franchise sits heavily in one individual’s name on a court-filed report. When that individual walks, some part of the franchise can walk too.
That reading is interpretation, not a filing fact. The filing fact is that FTI told investors in February 2025 that senior departures in the US competition part of Compass Lexecon could create substantial revenue and profitability headwinds. The subsequent Q1 release then recorded a 12.1 per cent fall in Economic Consulting revenue and a 6.6 per cent decline in billable headcount. Those figures do not prove causation by themselves, but they make the issue visible in the official record.
On the other side of the ledger, Econic Partners announced funding from Goldman Sachs Alternatives, the Willig family, the Ordover family and other investors. Its launch release described a firm built around senior competition economists and more than 100 experts and consultants. That is the partnership thesis made corporate: if clients attach to experts, then capital can try to back the experts directly.
The live question is whether the economics-consulting asset is more portable than a listed owner would like. The official sources cannot answer that fully; they can show that both sides treated the issue as commercially material.
FTI’s own filings say it bought Lexecon as of 28 November 2003 for about $129.2 million in cash, then completed the COMPASS acquisition on 6 January 2006 at a total acquisition cost of about $73.9 million, consisting of $48.2 million in cash and FTI stock valued at $25.7 million. FTI says Lexecon and COMPASS combined to form Compass Lexecon in 2008. Over the 17 years that followed, Compass Lexecon became one of the leading competition-economics practices in Europe and a central part of FTI’s economic-consulting story. The parent’s market capitalisation arc is useful context, but it should not be read as proof that one practice alone caused the whole listed-group rerating.
Then, in November 2023, FTI fired Orszag in a dispute over profit-sharing and control, and sued him. Orszag countersued. Through 2024 the case worked its way through the US federal courts while Orszag prepared a rival firm. On 19 February 2025 Econic Partners announced its launch, including financing from Goldman Sachs Alternatives, the Willig family, the Ordover family and other investors. Dennis Shaughnessy, FTI’s own former chair, was named on Econic’s board of managers.
FTI’s own investor record is enough to show the financial sensitivity. In the February 2025 earnings-call transcript, management said the senior departures in the US competition part of Compass Lexecon could have a substantial effect and used $35 million as an order-of-magnitude reference point. In the first-quarter 2025 release, Economic Consulting revenue fell 12.1 per cent year on year to $179.9 million; the same segment note records lower demand in antitrust and financial economics and a 6.6 per cent decline in billable headcount.
That is not a clean event study. FTI is a diversified group, and the release itself names demand weakness as well as headcount. But it is a clean warning for this series: when an expert bench moves, the economics can show up quickly in a listed parent’s segment numbers.
A second reason to compare pure-play partnerships with diversified conglomerates is governance. A diversified advisory group can house expert-witness economics beside businesses with different clients, incentives and reputational exposures. Even when an event elsewhere in the group has nothing to do with the economists, the shared brand can make it part of the economics practice’s commercial context.
That point should not be overstated. The governance-risk case here is a structural argument about brand umbrellas, not an allegation about Compass Lexecon’s own work. In this reading, corporate form changes which risks are pooled together and which are kept outside the partnership walls.
This is the cross-contamination risk that a pure-play expert-witness partnership is structured to avoid. The commercial argument runs in parallel: if the value of the business sits disproportionately in a small number of portable experts, the ownership structure has to keep those experts committed.
In this account, the partnership model is not a clean answer; it is a different allocation of conflicts. The most awkward passage in the January 2024 Financial Times piece is the one that records an earlier case in which a ProPublica investigation reported that Compass Lexecon had worked on both sides of an antitrust dispute. A federal judge described Orszag’s analysis in that matter as “unmoored,” and one of the clients sued the firm, saying they had not known that Compass Lexecon was advising the plaintiff and the defendant simultaneously.
This is the honest counter-argument. The same structural claim that makes the expert-witness economist so valuable, that clients hire the individual, not the firm, is also what makes it possible for a firm to end up on both sides of the same case without anyone quite noticing. A large partnership can face the same problem behind its name; a small partnership can avoid some conflicts only by refusing mandates and giving up revenue. Neither structure resolves the underlying tension. The work is adversarial by design. A practical question is which corporate form allocates the conflicts best.
Rakoff’s observation at that conference, that other jurisdictions use legal models where expert witnesses for competing sides co-operate rather than clash to put forward a common set of facts to the court, is a hint at a different answer, but one the US legal system is unlikely to reach for. The UK partly blends the adversarial model with a single-joint-expert tradition in some civil matters; the economics consulting market nonetheless runs on the American template. That template is what the UK partnerships have been built to serve.
Read the FTI–Orszag fight against the UK market the rest of this series describes, and a pattern comes into focus. The 18-partner RBB Economics partnership, based on a single floor of 199 Bishopsgate, posts the highest profit-per-partner visible in this project's detailed-account LLP sample. Oxera, employee-owned since its 2003 management buy-out, appears in the top tier of the Global Competition Review source set used here. Frontier Economics, employee-owned since its 1999 founding, offers the same broad ownership contrast in the wider economics and regulatory-consulting market. In this project file, none of the three is a listed conglomerate or carries a strategic-communications arm. Each is, in one way or another, a structural answer to the question the FTI–Orszag fight has just asked.
The 2002 NERA spinout that founded RBB is, in retrospect, a smaller-scale version of the 2025 Compass Lexecon spinout that founded Econic. Three senior economists left a large corporate employer, set up a partnership, and over the next two decades built one of the strongest per-partner performers visible in this project's filed-account sample. The parallel is interpretive, not documentary: the Orszag argument to Gunby, clients hire the expert, not the firm, is the argument Derek Ridyard might have made to NERA’s management in 2001 had the conversation been recorded.
The first external test of the thesis for Econic came quickly. In December 2025, less than a year after launch, Econic announced that Global Competition Review had ranked it “Elite” in the GCR100 2026 economics category. The ranking cited the seniority of the founding team and the pipeline of EU merger mandates that had followed them across. Read that against the 2002 RBB story and the question becomes sharper: if the market can endorse a new entrant at Elite within 12 months of launch, the incumbent brand may have less standalone franchise value than a listed owner would like. That is evidence consistent with the FTI–Orszag thesis, not proof of it.
The next test is not a self-valuation. It is whether Econic converts a financed launch, a senior expert bench and early market recognition into durable revenue. FTI’s investor materials show the incumbent-side pressure; Econic’s launch release shows the entrant-side ambition. The public evidence supports that comparison without needing to treat every press-reported number as if it were a filing fact.
The uncomfortable question for any listed firm that houses an expert-witness franchise is whether the same trade is waiting to be done in its own files. RBB demonstrated the partnership model in 2002 on a starting budget of roughly £2 million of first-year revenue. Orszag is testing a different version in 2025, with institutional launch funding behind it from day one. The next data point will be the senior associates and junior partners now watching how much of the franchise moves when the named expert moves. The next evidence will come from observed movement rather than argument.