Ryan Kenny: Hey, thanks for taking my question. So I thought the comment earlier was interesting around one of the levers to normalize M&A volumes being shrinking the time to close and we’ve been hearing about lags and time to close from the peer group. So wondering if you could give more color there. How do you shrink the time to close? And are you seeing any signs that those lags are mitigating at all?
Scott Beiser: I think most of the timeframe has to do with outside forces, not necessarily inside what bankers can do. Ultimately, the more robust an auction is, so you have more buyers than sellers at the moment are more potential lenders than borrowers and some fear or concern that if you don’t close or you don’t have the winning bid, or you don’t provide the right kind of capital structure, that opportunity may get taken away from you to a competitor. And I think we’ve talked about this for quite some time, that in the — I guess truly go-go [ph] days of calendar 2021, it was much more of a seller’s market and much more of a borrowers market, it then clearly flipped in 2022 and 2023, or more probably a buyer’s market and a lenders market, it has gotten more balanced, but not to a point where I’d say that it’s flipped to the seller side and a borrower side. And when that happens, you will start to see timeframes shrink once again.
Ryan Kenny: Do you feel like that’s more of a midsized deal phenomenon?
Scott Beiser: It’s both. I mean, we don’t have the issue of some very large mega cap deals that also run into regulations and antitrust, et cetera. So I wouldn’t call it in our case, it’s not governmental issues that are slowing things down. I think it’s more just bid ask spreads, buyer seller mindsets that’s caused kind of the timeframes to get a little longer than what we had seen over the last couple [ph] of decades.
Ryan Kenny: Thank you.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Mike Brown with KBW. Please proceed with your question.
Michael Brown: Okay, great. Thank you for taking my questions. I guess, I’d like to put a little finer point on the restructuring side of the business. So the fiscal third quarter was, as you said, I think the second strongest since COVID. And it sounds like there’s a number of reasons that the restructuring activity will be elevated here for some time. But I guess as I think about the revenue opportunity versus the fiscal third quarter, is it fair to assume that can be kind of a floor near-term? Obviously, it’s episodic, as you mentioned, but I guess on an average over the next year or so is that the right way to think about the potential for that business?
Scott Beiser: A couple of comments. I think we’ve said for the last probably at least a year, don’t view this restructuring cycle as something that we’re going to substantially increase revenues and then watch them substantially decrease. But look at this as a much more modest increase, but staying higher for a longer period of time. We did comment today relative to where we were probably a quarter ago, where last quarter we had noticed some softness in new business on the U.S side, that is no longer the case. So kind of new businesses really across the globe seems to be — on the — still strong heavy robust side and expect that it will continue to last for a while. So I think we kind of look at the levels that we’ve been at and recognizing this business has more quarterly volatility due to certain size transactions can cause that number to go up or down in the third quarter.
But it feels like where we’ve been running for the last couple quarters is the expected level for several more quarters.
Lindsey Alley: Yes. And so another way to say it is kind of take our year-to-date and divided by three quarters and to get that as a proxy, but recognizing that and we’ve said this before, it’s a lumpy business. So you have some quarters like this one, where you exceed that number and in some quarters, like last one where you’re below it. But that’s a pretty good way to think about how to model it.
Michael Brown: Okay, great. Thank you. Lindsey, just maybe a quick question for you on the expense side. I know it’s probably a little too early to know, but you mentioned this project. So any way to size the potential benefit of that once it is completed?
Lindsey Alley: Yes, I mean, we’ve obviously done some internal work on sort of what the cost savings are. I’m not going to give you a number, but I’ll kind of just walk you through a couple of obvious ones. We’re moving from roughly 50 legal entities, more than that to roughly 25. So we’re cutting our legal entities in half. And with almost every legal entity, we have accounting costs, we have tax costs, we have just third-party compliance costs, and you add all that up, and it starts to become a decent number. So there are some real savings there. They’re kind of built into our thinking. I think are they going to be material enough for you to model them? No. But they are certainly material enough to justify the expense. And so that’s probably the best way to think about it.
