Monterey County in California, for example, is currently paying Huron $5.1 million to transform Natividad Medical Center, a financially troubled public hospital, into a viable operation. A Huron-installed C.E.O. and C.F.O. have already cut losses by $17 million, in part by retraining the hospital's billing and collection staff.


And the need for crisis consulting continues to increase. More companies are finding themselves in trouble with regulators-or shareholders-than ever before. Between 2002 and 2004, financial restatements rose from 233 to 414, according to one Huron study. Another factor driving business is the post-Enron regulatory environment. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act effectively prohibits audit firms from providing many other consulting services to clients, including litigation support, valuation consulting, and due diligence.

"You can have many situations," says Huron's Burge. "There are lots of Eliot Spitzers out there, requiring more and better compliance and reporting out of corporations and other institutions. You can have a crisis situation, a company issue like an S.E.C. investigation that they want to get out from under fast and address concerns, or you could have a major piece of litigation."

Huron has benefited from all of this. Navistar International, a truckmaker, hired Huron last year after the S.E.C. began looking at the company's accounting and the N.Y.S.E. threatened to delist it for falling more than a year behind in filing its financial statements.

In one of its more publicized recent cases, Huron helped Warren Rudman, the former Republican senator from New Hampshire, untangle the genesis of the Fannie Mae accounting scandal. The mortgage giant was accused by regulators of providing misleading and incorrect financial statements. Huron used its forensic accounting skills to trace the origin of Fannie Mae's accounting failures in an effort to determine whether they were intentional. Fannie Mae eventually agreed to pay a $400 million penalty.

But perhaps Huron's greatest strength is something few other crisis-management firms have to offer: Many of its executives have been through a painful corporate meltdown of their own.

"I'll go to my grave feeling that what happened at Andersen was a great injustice," Broadhurst says. "It was a lot more political than we'll ever know. We were made a scapegoat, and there were 28,000 people who lost their livelihood.

"But," he continues, "though the Andersen thing was tragic and sad, we really feel blessed. Every day here is exciting. We started something new."