Company: CRAI
Filing Date: 2025-02-20
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0001053706-25-000007
Chunk: 46

Company: CRA INTERNATIONAL, INC.
Filing Date: 2025-02-20
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1A
Chunk 46
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, and other enterprises. These competing employers may be able to offer potential employees greater compensation and benefits or more attractive lifestyle choices, career paths, or geographic locations than we can. We must pay competitive market wages for these employee consultants and increased competition for our target candidates could adversely affect our margins and results of operations.

Maintaining our professional reputation is crucial to our future success

Our ability to secure new engagements and hire qualified consultants as employees depends heavily on our overall reputation as well as the individual reputations of our employee consultants and principal non-employee experts. Additionally, failure to comply with governmental, regulatory and legal requirements or with our company-wide policies could lead to 

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governmental or legal proceedings that could expose us to significant liabilities and damage our reputation. Because we obtain a majority of our revenues from new engagements with existing clients, any client that is dissatisfied with our performance on a single matter could seriously impair our ability to secure new engagements. Given the frequently high-profile nature of the matters on which we work, any factor that diminishes our reputation or the reputations of any of our employee consultants or non-employee experts could make it substantially more difficult for us to compete successfully for both new engagements and qualified consultants.

We depend on our non-employee experts

We depend on our relationships with our non-employee experts. We believe that these experts are highly regarded in their fields and that each offers a combination of knowledge, experience, and expertise that would be very difficult to replace. We also believe that we have been able to secure some engagements and attract some consultants in part because we can offer the services of these experts. Most of these experts can limit their relationships with us at any time for any reason. These reasons could include affiliations with universities with policies that prohibit accepting specified engagements, termination of exclusive relationships, the pursuit of other interests, and retirement.

In many cases we seek to include restrictive covenants in our agreements with our non-employee experts, which could include non-competition agreements and/or non-solicitation agreements. The limitation or termination of any of their relationships with us, or competition from any of them after these agreements expire, could harm our reputation, reduce our business opportunities and adversely affect our revenues and results of operations. The restrictive covenants that we may have with some of our non-employee experts offer us only limited protection and may not be enforceable in every jurisdiction. In the event that non-employee experts leave, clients working with these non-employee experts may decide that they prefer to continue working