Stock Finds in 'E-Discovery'

(As an example, Jabil Circuit (JBL Quote) CEO Tim Main said on the company's latest quarterly call that it spent $3 million in its fourth quarter alone to restore over 340 backup tapes, which generated a database of 175,000 documents with more than 850,000 pages of data. Over 13,000 option grants were issued in the period being reviewed.)

Jim Wilson, director of research with JMP Securities, sees FTI and its competitor Navigant Consulting (NCI Quote) each snagging about one-third of the business generated from the backdating investigations and thinks there are more to come.

Upside potential from the backdating business "is part of the reason I like both of them," he says. Wilson has a buy rating on both of the companies. He does not own the stocks and his firm does not have a banking relationship with the companies.

He estimated that a smaller competitor, LECG (XPRT Quote), has less than 10 backdating cases. He also recommends the shares.

"If the economy is slowing down, these would be pretty good growth companies with fairly recession-resistant businesses," Wilson says.

In the financial services and insurance industries, for instance, "a lot of these companies have regulatory issues they have to deal with all the time, and will use these consulting firms to help them," Wilson says. "Regulatory and litigation are not very cyclical."

Since mid-August, FTI has mirrored the rise in tech stocks, pumping up its shares about 39%. Navigant, meanwhile, has lifted 7.4% and LECG has risen almost 15% in the same period of time, as of Friday's close.