If you have a billable hour (or dozens) to spare, an old-school approach to lateral hiring is showing it has staying power as some law firms are proving successful by investing in pre-hire face time. But for those firms that can’t stomach repeating the interview process upward of 200 times, data analytics is starting to creep into the hiring process, too.

When Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton nears the end of the process for hiring a new lateral partner, candidates typically endure what firm chairman Guy Halgren dubs “The Tour”: a trip to almost all of the firm’s domestic offices, plus video conferences, to meet a large swath of its partnership.