When the U.S. Office of Comptroller of the Currency dropped its case against two former top London currency traders last week, it brought an unceremonious end to a high-profile, eight-year attempt to pin charges on the traders accusing them of rigging benchmark exchange rates in the multi-trillion dollar currency exchange market.

The hard-fought defense victory was a long time coming for Richard Usher,  the former head of EMEA foreign exchange spot trading at JPMorgan, and Rohan Ramchandani, the former European foreign exchange trading head at Citigroup, and their lawyers at White & Case and Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, respectively. A federal jury in the Southern District of New York acquitted the two traders and a third codefendant of criminal antitrust charges at trial nearly three years ago. But the lingering OCC action had faced them both with a potential lifetime ban from the finance industry and a $1.5 million fine.