FTI Consulting’s Dawna Wright wins international expert award
FTI Consulting has won a slew of honours at the latest annual Who’s Who Legal awards, including an individual accolade for the firm’s Australian Forensic Accounting head Dawna Wright.
The annual Who’s Who Legal awards has named Melbourne-based FTI Consulting senior managing director Dawna Wright as ‘Investigations Forensic Accountant of the Year’ ahead of a field of international peers.
A former partner at Deloitte, Wright has been with FTI Consulting for close to the past seven and a half years, and heads up the firm’s Forensic Accounting and Advisory Services practice in Australia, which she helped launch.
An expert witness specialised in presenting complex financial analysis to non-financial clients such as lawyers and company boards, Wright has amassed three decades of audit and forensics experience across multiple jurisdictions in the Asia Pacific, Europe and North America, after first kicking off her career with Deloitte in Canada in 1992 following a Bachelor of Commerce degree from the University of Manitoba.
She would altogether spend 16 years with the Big Four firm, making partner in Melbourne in 2004, before joining specialist advisory & restructuring firm McGrathNicol as a forensics partner for close to five and a half years. From there, she crossed to FTI Consulting in 2014, providing advice to clients in areas such as post-acquisition, shareholder, and construction disputes, corporate investigations, corruption reviews, and class action litigation.
In addition, Wright has headed a number of committees for high-profile organisations, including as chair of the forensics accounting committee of professional industry body Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand for four years to 2019. She was previously a director of the finance, audit and risk committee of the Australian Institute of Management, and is presently a member of the finance & audit committee of Amnesty International.
Who’s Who Legal
Wright’s was one of a number of accolades garnered by FTI Consulting in the latest awards from leading legal industry research organisation Who’s Who Legal, including 2021 ‘Consulting Firm of the Year’ for the sixth consecutive year. It also took home the awards for Arbitration Experts, Construction and Insurance Expert Witnesses, Investigations Digital Forensics, and Restructuring & Insolvency Advisers firm of the year.
Speaking on the recognition, Wright said the mix of expertise together with its culture made the firm stand out. “Our unique combination of practices within FTI enables us to approach issues from a number of different angles. But we not only have a group of amazing and talented experts across a wide range of disciplines – we also have a highly collaborative culture that encourages, facilitates and rewards them for working together.”
Along with the awards, FTI’s damages and valuation practitioners dominated the latest Who’s Who Legal Arbitration 2022: Expert Witnesses list, together with its subsidiary Compass Lexecon earning more than twice the number of entries as the next closet firm – including a nod for its Australian Construction Solutions practice head and Perth-based senior managing director Stephen Rae, a three-decade industry veteran who joined the firm in 2012.