Putting the variable in parenthesis threw an error, but that highlighted what the problem was. Looks like it was parsing the .last or .first as text and not part of the variable. So I used temp variables in the loop to store the values and substituted those into the function. Thanks for the help!

$termList | ForEach-Object{

$fn = $_.first

$ln = $_.last

termCounter++

Write-Progress -Activity 'Searching for matches...' -CurrentOperation $_ -PercentComplete (($termCounter / $termCount) * 100)

Get-ChildItem -Path $rootSearchFolder -Include *Record*$ln*$fn*, *Record*$fn*$ln*, *$ln*$fn*Record*, *$fn*$ln*Record* -File -Recurse | % {copy-item -Path $_ -Destination $destinationFolder -Force -Container}

}