In January, China’s securities regulator handed down its first punishment for a lawyer who engaged in insider trading. Mi Xingping, a partner at top Beijing law firm Jun He Law Offices, had leaked information about a merger he was working on to a relative who traded on it, the regulator said.

Such an act in the United States would no doubt result in disbarment and possibly jail time. Last November, Matthew Kluger, a former senior associate in the Washington, D.C., office of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, was disbarred and given a 12-year prison sentence for passing on insider information from his work.