FTI Consulting Interview Prep

Tell me about yourself

Hello! My name is Chloe. I'm a Junior at UC Berkeley studying Political Science and Legal Studies, with a focus on International Relations and the intersection of Law & Markets. Right now I'm balancing my work as a market research intern for a tech startup and an honors thesis on ICE and agribusiness labor trafficking.

My interest in investigative work really took shape during an intelligence internship, where I helped an investigation into an $88M North Korean IT worker scheme, tracing illicit financial networks and nation-state threat vectors, and eventually bringing our findings to the Senate. This has been the kind of work that energizes me: piecing together a financial and organizational picture from incomplete, sometimes deliberately obscured information, under real time pressure, for people who need to act on it.

Outside of my resume, I’m an athlete. I grew up doing rodeo and swimming. From a young age I’ve always thrived in high-pressure environments — although hopefully now with less bruises and sunburns.

Why FTI?

A few things drew me specifically to FTI's Forensic & Litigation practice. First, the multidisciplinary model — you're on teams with forensic accountants, lawyers, and former investigators, not siloed with people who all have the same background. That mirrors the environment I did my best work in during the North Korea IT worker investigation, where the strongest findings came from combining financial analysis with open-source and geopolitical context — no single lens would've gotten us there.

Second, the scale and credibility of the work itself. FTI's investigations team was just named the top firm on the 2026 Lexology Index Investigations list, and I've read through several of their case studies — the $29 million procurement fraud investigation, for instance — and what stands out is the speed and discretion required: figuring out what actually happened inside an organization under real time pressure, for clients who need an answer they can act on, not just an interesting finding. That's the exact instinct I built briefing a Senator's office on a live threat investigation, and it's what I want to keep doing.

And practically, FTI works across jurisdictions and industries rather than one narrow sector, which appeals to me — my background so far spans intelligence, congressional, and market research work, and I'd rather build depth in investigative method than get locked into one industry this early.

Finally, FTI’s women’s initiative. I am a strong advocate for women’s rights and equality and seeing such an initiative to empower women is very telling about FTI’s culture.

Why FLC?

FLC specifically is where I want to be because it sits at the intersection of investigation and law, which is exactly the combination I've been building toward. My Legal Studies coursework and time using Lexis+ and Westlaw gave me the legal research foundation, but it was the intelligence work that showed me I actually like the investigative side: tracing financial and organizational threads through incomplete information, figuring out what's actually true, and writing it up so counsel or a client can act on it. That's a different skill set than the valuation or restructuring work in Corporate Finance, or the economic modeling in Econ Consulting — FLC is fact-finding under pressure, and that's the part of the work I find most engaging.

My thesis reinforces that same instinct in a different setting — I'm looking at how enforcement actions in California's Central Valley affect the visibility of labor trafficking to the institutions meant to detect it, which has meant piecing together a picture from incomplete data and sources who don't always want to talk. It's the same core move as a corporate investigation: something is happening beneath the surface, the paper trail is incomplete or contested, and the job is to find what's actually there and make it defensible.

And practically, FLC's model — small teams of forensic accountants, lawyers, and investigators working a case together — is exactly the kind of team I want to be learning from this early, rather than a segment where I'd be doing one type of analysis in isolation.

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