RENY: What are some of the ways this partnership will play out?

Schonbraun: A good example is that FTI provides a tremendous amount of consulting work and strategy work to financial institutions. The banking industry is struggling itself right now. Banks are looking for earnings; they're looking for greater liquidity and ways to achieve stability. Real estate, to us, is one of the great ways for financial institutions to do that. Most financial institutions, through their divisional offices or processing centers or branch offices, own a meaningful amount of real estate. Typically, that real estate is not earning income for these banks on an ongoing basis. It really is an illiquid asset that's sitting on their balance sheet. We have a great deal of experience helping financial institutions understand their real estate and what the opportunities are. But banks are not in the real estate business; typically they don't need to accumulate real estate themselves.

So we think we can do a great job for financial institutions that are not our core clientele and help them strategize on how to use the real estate in a much better way. They can take what real estate value is there, redeploy the capital in their own business and wind up in a sale or sale-leaseback which we could help them execute, because our clients are probably the ultimate buyers of that real estate.

RENY: What were SMG's plans for global growth before the alliance, and how will the alliance help facilitate what you would have found it a challenge to do on your own?

Schonbraun: We're a service company, so our clients take us where they go. And they've gone international over the past years. We've gone international with them. We're working on two or three exciting projects in China right now, we're working on a massive project in Korea with Gale and we've worked on several projects in Mexico. We've been very active in Western Europe and more recently have gotten involved in Eastern Europe.

As you start to get involved internationally, it's very helpful to have some local knowledge and have local people on the ground. On our Chinese projects, we have hired some Americans of Chinese background who speak Mandarin and sent them overseas on assignment. Now, working with FTI, which is on the ground in major cities all over the world, we'll have local offices ourselves in all of these world capitals. That will go a long way toward helping us provide better results for our clients operating in these environments. Internationally, the FTI combination is a huge benefit for us.