PJT Partners Inc. Q2 2026 Earnings Call

Good day. Welcome to the PJT Partners second quarter 2026 earnings call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Sharon Pearson, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, ma'am. Thank you very much.

Good morning. Welcome to the PJT Partners second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. I'm Sharon Pearson, Head of Investor Relations at PJT, and joining me today is Paul Taubman, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Helen Meates, our Chief Financial Officer. Before I turn the call over to Paul, I want to point out that during the course of this conference call, we may make a number of forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties. There are important factors that could cause actual outcomes to differ materially from those indicated in these statements. We believe that these factors are described in the Risk Factors section contained in PJT Partners 2025 Form 10-K, which is available on our website at pjtpartners.com.

I want to remind you that the company assumes no duty to update any forward-looking statements. The presentation we make today contains non-GAAP financial measures, which we believe are meaningful in evaluating the company's performance. For detailed disclosures on these non-GAAP metrics and their GAAP reconciliations, you should refer to the financial data contained within the press release we issued this morning, also available on our website. With that, I'll turn the call over to Paul.

Thank you, Sharon. Good morning. Thank you for joining today's earnings call. Earlier today, we reported record results across the board. Second quarter and first-half revenues, adjusted pre-tax income, and adjusted EPS were all the highest in our firm's history. For the second quarter, revenues were $486 million, up 20%. Adjusted pre-tax income was $106 million, up 32%, and adjusted EPS was $1.97, up 28% from year-ago levels. For the first half of the year, revenues increased 24%, adjusted pre-tax income increased 39%, and adjusted EPS increased 36% compared to 2025 levels. When we began this journey, we characterized our firm as an alpha play on strategic advisory. For more than a decade, we've been committed to consistent and continuing investment in our strategic advisory business with the goal of enhancing our footprint, our capabilities, and our brand.

These investments have transformed the scale and scope of our strategic advisory business, it's clearly evident in our financial results. Even with this significant build-out, we still have much more to build and much more to achieve. As that build-out progresses, it will drive opportunities for additional growth in our other businesses. We are increasingly becoming an alpha play, not just in strategic advisory, but across all of our businesses. Before I turn the call over to Helen, I'd like to say a few words about our CFO transition. Helen will be stepping down as Chief Financial Officer on October 1st, after more than a decade of extraordinary service. She will, however, remain with us through year-end to ensure a seamless transition. Helen has been my partner and sounding board from day one.

A lot of what we have accomplished reflects her leadership, her dedication, and her uncompromising integrity. On behalf of the board and all her colleagues, I want to thank her for her innumerable contributions to PJT Partners. I would also like to congratulate Arun Kalra on his elevation from Director of Finance to CFO. Since joining PJT in 2016, Arun has worked side by side with Helen to develop our global finance function. I am confident that Arun will build upon the strong foundation Helen has established and help write the next chapters of our growth story. After Helen takes you through our financial results, I will review our business performance and outlook in greater detail. Helen? Thank you, Paul. It has been a real privilege to serve in this role, I would like to thank our investors and research analysts for your partnership, your insights, and your support of our firm over the years.

I'm looking forward to partnering with Arun as he steps into the CFO role on October 1, My priority will be to ensure that this is a smooth transition. Now turning to our financial results, beginning with revenue. Total revenues for the second quarter were $486 million, up 20% year-over-year. For the six months ended June 30, total revenues were $904 million, up 24% year-over-year. As Paul mentioned, a record for both the second quarter and six-month periods. Revenues in all our businesses increased for both the second quarter and first six-month periods, with record revenues in strategic advisory and restructuring.

We had a number of transaction completions that met the criteria for revenues to be pulled forward in the second quarter, totaling $35 million across eight transactions, which is $14 million more than year-ago pull forwards. Turning to expenses consistent with prior quarters, we've presented the expenses for certain non-GAAP adjustments, which are more fully described in our 8-K. First, adjusted compensation expense. We accrued compensation expense at 66.5% of revenues for the first half of the year, compared with 67.5% for the same period last year. This ratio represents our current best estimate for full year 2026. Total adjusted non-compensation expense was $57 million in the second quarter, up 10% year-over-year and $114 million for the first half, up 12% year-over-year. As a percentage of revenues, 11.8% in the second quarter and 12.6% in the first half.

The main drivers of the expense increase for the first half of the year were the same as the first quarter. Higher occupancy costs and depreciation expense relating to the expansion of our global office footprint, higher travel and business-related expenses, and higher professional fees. We now expect our non-comp expense growth for the year to be slightly higher than previous guidance and closer to 14% year-over-year. The increase primarily reflects the expectation of elevated business-related expense year-over-year, particularly travel and related and professional fees, as well as higher expenses associated with continued investments in AI and technology infrastructure. Turning to adjusted pre-tax income. We reported record second quarter and first half adjusted pre-tax income of $106 million and $189 million respectively.

Our adjusted pre-tax margin was 21.7% for the second quarter, compared with 19.7% for the same period last year, and 20.9% for the first six months, compared with 18.6% for the same period last year. The provisions for taxes, as with prior quarters, we've presented our results as if all partnership units had been converted to shares and that all of our income was taxed at a corporate tax rate. Our effective tax rate for the first half of the year was 20.5%. This is our current estimate for the full year and in line with prior guidance. Our adjusted if-converted earnings was a record for the second quarter at $1.97 per share, up 28%, and a record $3.51 for the first half, up 36% from the same period last year. For the quarter, our weighted average share count was 42.6 million shares, down 2% versus a year ago.

During the quarter, we repurchased approximately 498,000 shares and share equivalents, primarily through open market repurchases. Our repurchases for the first six months of the year totaled approximately 2.1 million shares. On the balance sheet, we ended the quarter with $575 million in cash equivalents, and short-term investments, and we have no funded debt outstanding. Finally, the board has approved a quarterly dividend of $0.25 per share. I'll turn the call back to Paul.

Thank you, Helen. Beginning with restructuring. Year to date, our market-leading restructuring team ranked number 1 in global announced restructurings, number 1 in global completed restructurings, number 1 in U.S. announced restructurings, and number 1 in U.S. completed restructurings. Not surprisingly, given the strong market position, our restructuring team delivered record results for the second quarter and first half, comfortably ahead of prior year levels. We continue to operate in an environment of sustained demand for liability management and restructuring advice. The speed of technological change and dislocation is challenging companies across industries. Many companies are dealing with uncomfortably high leverage, higher financing costs, and challenged operating models. For a subset of these companies, these challenges are existential. Unlike historical norms, this concentrated stress is playing out against a backdrop of broadly constructive macroeconomic conditions and favorable financing markets.

Simply put, we anticipate restructuring activity to remain elevated for the foreseeable future. We also expect our ever more powerful strategic advisory franchise to expand our opportunity set for restructuring and other liability management services. Turning to PJT Park Hill. Significant growth in Private Capital Solutions more than offset declines in primary fundraising, enabling PJT Park Hill revenues to increase for the second quarter and first half compared to year-ago levels. Our PCS business benefited from close collaboration with strategic advisory and access to an extensive network of global LPs. Given PCS's strong secular growth characteristics and the opportunity to leverage this integrated platform, we continue to invest in this business. On the primary side, our differentiated high-quality pipeline of fundraisers should enable us to deliver strong relative performance even as the overall primary fundraising market remains challenging. Turning to strategic advisory. For the second quarter and first half of the year, our strategic advisory business delivered record revenues significantly above year-ago levels.

We continue to operate in a favorable, albeit volatile, deal environment. Despite the stop-start cadence of activity in the first half of the year, the market has been broadly constructive but challenged by continuing geopolitical and AI uncertainties, which add to volatility. Even though the M&A market has gained steam as the year has progressed, we are seeing a sharp increase in the number of companies who are investigating M&A opportunities, the annualized level of M&A activity is only up single-digit % from year-ago levels. Against that backdrop, our M&A backlog continues to build with mandate counts at record levels up more than 20% compared to year-ago levels.

Our pre-announced pipeline, which reflects revenue potential from these mandates, is up an even greater % and is also at record levels. Notwithstanding the sizable number of closings we experienced in Q2, our announced pending closed backlog increased appreciably from Q1 levels and ended Q2 just slightly below year-ago levels. As we look ahead, during our journey, we have been steadfast in our commitment to value-enhancing long-term investments that scale and strengthen our business. Over time, these investments have been essential drivers of our growth, enabling us to build our capabilities, our footprint, and our brand. For the full year, all of our businesses are on track for record performance. We do, however, expect our revenue growth rate for the full year to be less than that achieved in the first half of the year. As before, we remain confident in our near, intermediate, and long-term growth prospects.

With that, we will now take your questions.

Ladies and gentlemen, at this time the floor is open for your questions. To ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. To get out of the queue, press star two. Our first question today comes from Devin Ryan with Citizens. Your line is now open.

Thanks. Good morning, thanks for taking the questions. I just want to start and say congratulations to Helen and Arun as well. It's been a pleasure, a consummate professional, and Arun, best wishes to you as well. Looking forward to working with you. Question where I'd like to start here just is on the strategic advisory business. When I look at the, Paul, the partner totals in that group, you had 91 at the end of the second quarter. I think 19 have been on the platform for less than two years. That ratio keeps declining. It's only 20%. That's been one thing that we've looked at just to think about kind of the maturation of the broader PJT Advisory business. I appreciate there's still a lot of white space from here to grow in the absolute.

Do you feel like we're getting close to maybe more of a steady state of productivity for kind of the partner group here as now a smaller number is less than two years on platform? Just trying to think about kind of where we are in the maturation of that business and the productivity per partner, really.

I think the short answer is no. I think we're building, you tend to see step function changes, it's not just a one-factor model. You need to look at where the investment is and when you get to critical mass in those investments. If you're going to build out a region, if you have one individual who's been there for an extended period of time, that may be necessary, but not sufficient. Each partner does not operate independent of the other partners and the overall franchise. What we're seeing increasingly are the network effects as we continue to build out. It's not just time in seat. It's also whether or not we've achieved critical mass in any one of our initiatives, it's also brand awareness, brand building, walk-in, all of those things come together.

I think we're still early days in seeing the true potential of what we're building.

Okay. Good to hear. Thank you. Just as a follow-up on the restructuring outlook, appreciate you continue to expect kind of elevated levels of activity. Can we maybe put a finer point on just what you're seeing in the environment and to the degree of things remaining elevated? We're kind of approaching maturity walls. There's obviously some consternation in the software space. Is there a scenario here where that could still have reasonable growth as we look out in the coming years? Or is it elevated just mean kind of around similar levels? I'm not sure if we can get any deeper on the thought there. Thank you. Yeah. Look, there's sort of the overall market, and then there's our addressable market.

I see our addressable market continuing to expand. Even though we have a leadership position, I see our addressable market continuing to expand for really three reasons, right? One is, we continue to expand geographically. We're opening up new markets where we have an opportunity to claim our rightful share of that activity. I think the second is there are relationships and deep domain expertise that continues to be brought to bear that when it comes to the borrower side, as we build out our strategic advisory platform, we have more looks. The third is we've had very strong success with the most sophisticated and repeat consumers of liability management services, which are private equity firms in the alt space.

As we continue to build out our coverage and touch more of those companies, we also increase our opportunities there. If you asked me where are we in the overall cycle, I think we're closer to normal than we are to where we've been historically. I've repeatedly said that looking in the rear view mirror, you're seeing abnormally light levels of activity, partly because we had interest rates that were near zero, and because we had very flexible documents with very few covenants and long-dated maturities. Ultimately, many of those investments end up stumbling at some point, and they need to be managed actively. What we are seeing is in the entire LME space, our owners want to get ahead of these issues, and therefore, they're being more proactive in managing their liability stack.

You're dealing with a greater quantum of debt, you're dealing with more normalized interest rates, you're dealing with more proactive addressing of these issues. You're dealing with a broader toolkit, you're dealing with more normalized interest rates. I think that gets us to another level, but none of that really reflects true shocks to the system. None of that reflects a recessionary environment. None of that reflects any sort of more bearish sentiment. Then there's really, if you will, a call option if things were to become more challenging from a macro perspective. We only control one thing, and that's our competitive efforts. I see our competitive efforts strengthening over time, which gives us tailwind.

Yeah. Really appreciate the context, Paul. Once again, yeah, Helen and Arun, congratulations.

Thanks, David. Thank you. Our next question comes from Brennan Hawken with BMO Capital Markets.

Your line is now open.

Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. I'd also like to give a big congrats to Helen on her retirement and on Arun on his new role. Looking forward to working with you.

Thanks, Brennan. Looking across the businesses, Paul, you gave some great color there.

It sounds like they've all grown. You just gave us some really good color on the outlook for restructuring. It seems as though the growth rates are at different rates here. Is that right? Is strategic advisory still delivering most of it? Maybe more importantly, given we're going to see a slower growth rate in the back half of the year versus the first half, which of your businesses do you expect to drive that slower growth?

The slower growth. I think we grew something like 24% for the first half of the year. I just flat out don't think we're going to have a wonderful year, and we're building something really special. I don't think we're going to grow 24% for the full year. That's it. Just nothing more than that. I think we're seeing growth in lots of different places. We're seeing a lot of growth in our PCS business as our secondary practice continues to mature, and I think there's both a macro and a micro story there. We see it in strategic advisory. We see it continuing to move higher in liability management. If you said in aggregate dollars, where's going to be the biggest source of growth? If macro conditions stay roughly consistent with where they are today, it's continuing to ride the strategic advisory build-out.

Got it. Okay. Paul, previously you'd focused more on really operating leverage versus comp leverage. Interesting to hear you discuss the drivers of the pre-tax margin expansion that you saw in the second quarter. Given that we've got maybe a bit of an acceleration in non-comp, how you think about adding another roughly two percentage points to the margin, similar to what you did in 2025? Thanks. Well, we haven't abandoned our perspective, which is we focus mostly on pre-tax margin and less on the components to get there.

I continue to believe we can deliver operating leverage in our business and will continue to do so. The precise pace and timing of that improvement, I think will largely be a function of two things. Which is how robust our revenue growth ends up being for the full year. Ultimately the best way to create operating leverage in the business is to grow the top line as long as you're being responsible with your cost structure. The second is what the competitive environment is. It's a competitive environment not just for talent, but if you just look at things like travel, we're dealing with where the overall market is.

I continue to believe we will continue on this journey of providing increasing operating margins for our shareholders.

Thanks for taking my questions.

Thank you. Thank you. Our next question comes from James Yaro with Goldman Sachs.

Your line is now open.

Firstly, Helen, congrats on the spectacular run, and I wish you the best going forward.

Thank you Turning quickly to broader AI impacts on investment banking activity.

In my opinion, those appear to be more on the financing market side of the business rather than in M&A or maybe in advisory more broadly. Paul, I'd just love to get your sense of how you think your businesses benefit from AI-related investment banking activity.

Well, clearly there are a lot of companies who are exposed as a result of these disruptions, and they're rethinking their own competitive position. For some of those companies, that will beget more transaction activity. There's no doubt that not everyone will be a winner as we redefine the landscape. If you just start there'll be a lot of companies who will either see the price action in their shares, something that needs to be capitalized on. You may see more take privates of healthy companies that otherwise can't seem to regain their prior valuations. You'll see companies that believe that they need to be part of a larger scaled operation, and as a result, there will be more activity.

You'll probably see more difficulty in private equity firms being able to create all of the initially planned DPI to their investors, which will probably drive a desire to perhaps monetize other assets in the portfolio that haven't been impacted by AI disruptions. You will probably see an increase in demand for PCS and secondary transactions. You will see more creative financings of data center build-outs and the like, and integrated approaches, in which case we will benefit because our capital markets team and our industry bankers have worked on and continue to work on a multitude of financing situations. I can continue to go on, but I think it will net-net be healthy for our business.

That's a very comprehensive answer. Thanks, Paul. Just wanted to turn quickly to private equity M&A. We did see, at least on an industry basis private equity M&A, announced M&A improve in June. Just love to get your perspective on where we are in the private equity M&A improvement, and whether you think perhaps the second half of this year and beyond could look more like the second half of last year where there was a somewhat sharp recovery.

The short answer is I do. I don't think that we stay at these levels. I've been cautious about the M&A environment, not because I'm negative on the M&A environment. I just think everything isn't a one-way trade, that there's always puts and takes in everything, and it's rarely all good news. It's actually become more difficult to get transactions done. I think that's a great thing. We will operate best in an environment where differentiated advice is appreciated, where it's not so easy just to put an asset up for sale and see three people trying to preempt the process and everything flies off the shelf. A constructive market, but one where skill and experience and gravitas all matter, that is the environment that's best for us. That's the environment we're in today.

There's an enormous amount of capital that wants to be put to work, but a lot of it is being put to work in structured investments as opposed to just simply take privates. There's a lot of skill and nuance in take private situations, whether you're advising the independent directors, the company, or the buyer, and all of that plays to our strengths. I do think that we're seeing a recovery from the lows. I don't think it's going to be just sort of dramatic and give you whiplash, but it is going to be a steady improvement would be my prediction.

Excellent. That's very clear. Thanks a lot.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Mike Brown with UBS. Your line is now open.

Okay, great. Good morning, everyone. I'll echo everyone's comments here. Congrats, Helen. Congrats to you, Arun, as well.

Thanks, Mike. Paul, I wanted to ask a little bit about the PCS business here.

The first half, a record amount of volume in the secondaries market. Looks like it was up about 20% year-over-year. The GP-led market was up about 35%, so kind of outpacing the broader market. Maybe just talk a little bit about how your secondaries business performed maybe relative to that market backdrop. How has traction been as you continue to invest in the business specifically. A little more specifically on the GP-led capability side. Thank you. Well, I think the short answer is we performed very well relative to the market benchmarks.

We feel really good about our business. We see tremendous opportunity to ride both the macro trend, but also our ability to continue to be recognized for differentiated execution, for structuring, and being able to have an integrated approach with our primary fundraising business and with our strategic advisory business, which is differentiated, is increasingly recognized.

Got it. Great. Thanks for the color there. Helen, I can't let you get off of an earnings call without a question on comp ratio. You guys have talked about that you're accruing at the 66.5. That's the best estimate for the year. Clearly, some very positive commentary on the pipeline here. If the second half continues to play out nicely here relative to your expectations, what would cause that comp ratio to be able to come in a little bit below that 66.5? What would we kind of need to see play out here? Maybe just kind of touch on what you're expecting to see in terms of investments in talent in the second half as the kind of puts and takes as we think about that comp ratio.

Just a reminder, when we look at the comp ratio, we do take a full year view. That incorporates what we think the revenue outlook looks like for the year. Also, the hiring plan for the full year, Paul mentioned the competitive backdrop. As we sit here today, that is our best estimate for the full year. We will refresh it in Q3, that is really what we expect.

Thank you so much. Thank you.

Our next question comes from Steven Chubak with Wolfe Research. Your line is now open.

Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. Might as well keep a consistent pattern. Congrats, Helen, on your retirement and Arun on your new role. Looking forward to working together.

Thank you, Steven. Of course.

Maybe just to start on liability management. Paul, LME activity has been quite robust these last couple of years. You've been a clear leader. You noted that you're atop various league tables, however you might look at it. While the activity remains strong, some data sources that we track have shown that the mix is shifting back towards more traditional Chapter 7 or 11 bankruptcies. I wanted to see if you're seeing a similar trend across your franchise, and how you're positioned if more activity starts to shift away from LME.

I don't know if it's shifting away from LME or if it's in addition to, right? Because at the end of the day, you need to look at sheer quantum of LME and sheer quantum of in-court restructuring. It probably is moving a little bit more as far as balance in that direction. I think we're well positioned for that as well. We continue to see tremendous opportunities everywhere we look. I've been on this bandwagon for a long time, which is this was not a one-year trade that we're away from the abnormally low levels of liability management and restructuring of prior years. Every day that goes by, people's interest rate forecasts tend to ever so subtly creep higher. That's going to put more pressure on companies.

I think more company are going to find that they're out of options in the sense that they've tried to deal with their liabilities as best they could for as long as they could, but ultimately, there may be no recourse other than an in-court restructuring. We're going to see the mix continue to evolve over time. We look at all of the places where we would not have been competitive previously because we didn't have an existing corporate relationship, we didn't have the right industry bankers, we weren't there early, we weren't covering the private equity firm. We didn't have a preexisting relationship. We hadn't been able to prove our mettle. We weren't in those geographies which had meaningful levels of restructuring opportunity.

All of those dials keep turning ever so slightly in our favor, and that's what makes us most optimistic about our franchise and its durability. Now, that doesn't mean that every quarter is going to be better than the quarter before, but if you said to me, "Is this a durable environment for us?" Absolutely. Do we have opportunities to continue to grow our business? I would say yes. Do we have opportunities to grow our share? I would say yes. We feel good about it, but no doubt it's going to morph a little bit. I also don't spend a lot of time thinking about this quarter to quarter because the statistics in any one quarter might tell you one story. The question is, what's the three-year story? What's the five-year story? And that's kind of how we see it.

That's great color, Paul, and it's a good segue, too, and a question that is maybe trying to look at the long-term trajectory on a three-to-five-year lens, but really focused on the non-comp side. Over the last five years, you've been consistently growing non-comps, low double digit. Unsurprising given that you've been in growth mode. Given much of the operating leverage for you and your industry peers is really derived from non-comp leverage, especially given the competition for talent, just wanted to better understand how far along you are in the infrastructure and geographic build-out, and when you might expect to see some moderation in non-comp growth or an ability to bend the cost curve.

What I would say is that ever since we became a public company, we have focused on investing in the business, which comes with cost, and have looked for opportunities for efficiency. Some of those costs are function costs, and one big one is occupancy. Right now we've taken on additional space in New York and London, and obviously that gives us an opportunity to grow into that space. That's where you see some efficiencies. I don't think you can look at any straight line growth rate other than realize that when there's investment that comes at a higher, if you look at it as a % of revenues. If you look at our non-comps as a % of revenues, we've been pretty efficient. We're currently in the 12.5% range. As I said, we focus on investment.

Against that investment, we are constantly looking for ways to be more efficient.

Yeah, I would say that when we started the firm, the expectation of what our traditional non-comp to revenue number was is a heck of a lot higher than what we've been able to deliver, notwithstanding the fact that we've been in aggressive growth mode. I think we've been quite good at managing our costs. What I don't want to do, though, is manage to a quarter and end up disrupting the long-term health of the franchise. When you think about infrastructure and cybersecurity and all of that, we're never going to be trying to fine-tune a ratio in a quarter at the expense of data security, data integrity. As we continue to grow the business and we have more convening power, I would expect us to do more conferences. The conferences that we put on are incredibly well-attended.

They have high content, and we've gotten tremendous responses from clients, potential clients, and it's been to great commercial effect. What you can be assured of is that every dollar we spend is well spent. We're always spending with a view that the long-term returns on that investment are high.

Really helpful, caller. Thanks so much for taking my questions.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Our next question comes from Alex Bond with KBW. Your line is now open.

Hey, good morning, everyone, and thanks for taking the questions. Congrats again to Helen on a great run. Paul, you added some helpful commentary around how the current software dynamic is impacting restructuring. Hoping you can add some color around what you're seeing for software-related activity on the M&A side currently, maybe expectations there over the coming quarters and into next year. Similarly, it would be helpful to hear a little bit more around how the secondaries business is being impacted here, just given the volume of software-related TVs in recent years.

Let me give you a quick sense. Look, there was clearly a shock to the system. The challenge for many of these companies is the debate is about the terminal value. The debate is not about what the near-term operating performance is going to be for these companies, which puts many of the companies who are actually most insulated from some AI threats in the most difficult and frustrating positions because there's a perception that the long-term value's been impaired. Managements and boards don't believe it. There's no clear path to sort of win that debate in the short term. Ultimately, over time, you will see a tiering that not all of these companies deserve the same treatment. As a result, there'll be some recovery and some others will need to either deal with their liability stack if they're highly leveraged or potentially find strategic alternatives.

There'll probably be more confidence on the part of strategics and capital providers to lean in a little bit as some of the headline risk potentially recedes. Like anything else, after there's a shock to the system, after there's some seasoning in pricing, after some of the early volatility recedes, you return to deal-making mode. That's either making confidence capital investments, that's pursuing take privates, that's pursuing some strategic activity on either the buy side or the sell side, or that is leading to a change in the way these companies communicate to investors in an effort to be able to seek a differentiated valuation relative to the peer group. All of those things will benefit us over time, and I think we're a lot closer to seeing some of that start to occur.

I think the first six months was probably too soon for most of those companies.

Got it. Okay. That's helpful color. Maybe for my follow-up, just wanted to ask around the year-to-date net hiring activity at the partner level and how this is progressing from your lens. Maybe where should we expect the year-over-year partner headcount growth to end up, relative to the historical level or average now that we're a little over halfway through the year and you have a little bit more visibility. Thank you. My heuristic is it's sort of same as the year before, and it could be higher and it could be lower, right?

That's a pretty good trend line year in and year out, but there's volatility, and it could easily spike up. You should assume we're in a significant number of important dialogues on the recruiting side. Recruiting is 24/7, 365 days a year, literally. We spend a tremendous amount of time, and how that all shows up in a quarter or two doesn't really mean much about trend. In some ways, it's quite analogous to transaction announcements. You can be incredibly active and nothing gets announced, then all of a sudden, five get announced. I think that's how you should think about our recruiting. We continue to be an employer of choice.

I think every day that goes by, we are more interesting, more compelling to high-quality bankers around the globe. I don't know exactly how we'll end of the year. We never think about it in terms of quotas or hiring minimums or maximums. Past is a pretty good indicator of what the future's going to be. If it turns out to be higher, it just means we were able to capitalize on some opportunities. If it comes in a little lower, it just means that probably some of that will roll into 2027.

Got it. Thanks, Paul. Thank you.

Thank you. That concludes our question and answer period. I would now like to turn the call back over to Mr. Taubman for closing remarks.

Once again, just want to thank everyone for their interest in our company and for participating in today's earnings call. We wish everyone a wonderful end of summer, and we'll see you in the fall.