Recent U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement actions charging senior lawyers at Apple and SeaWorld with insider trading provide reason to dust off company insider trading policies and assess whether updates or additional training are needed. As sanctuaries for corporate America’s most valuable confidential information, law departments are among the first places regulators look when trying to determine the source of a trader’s material nonpublic information.

Insider trading enforcement remains a cornerstone of the SEC’s enforcement program. Over the past 10 years, the SEC has significantly enhanced its insider trading surveillance, detection and investigative capabilities. Through the adoption of new investigative approaches and the development of new technology, the SEC staff has indicated that it has the ability to connect “patterns of trading to sources of material nonpublic information” as never before. The implication of this ability is that not only can the SEC use trading data to establish potential relationships among and between traders, but it can use relationship information to deduce whether they have sources of prohibited information who are common to them. According to the SEC, it uses “data analysis tools to detect suspicious patterns such as improbably successful trading across different securities over time.”