2022 Up & Coming Attorneys: Benjamin Hamborg

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Henson & Efron, P.A. Benjamin Hamborg is a business litigation attorney who works on many high-profile cases.

Hamborg handles shareholder disputes, contract disputes and some employment law. Because of his writing background — Hamborg holds a bachelor’s degree in English and a master’s degree in literature, and taught classes at Southwest Minnesota State University for a year — he also helps other practices, such as the family law group, with appellate work.

Hamborg’s biggest case led to one of the largest whistleblower awards in Minnesota history and Minnesota Lawyer’s Attorneys of the Year (AOY) award for him and fellow Henson & Efron, P.A. attorney Court Anderson. Minority shareholders of a company accused the controlling shareholders of manipulating the stock price and loading up the company with crushing debt. The resulting $24 million in sanctions against the controlling shareholders led to $7 million for Anderson and Hamborg’s clients under the SEC’s whistleblower program.

But Hamborg was on another prominent case at the beginning of his career. When sniper and Navy SEAL Chris Kyle wrote a book that accused former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura of saying derogatory things about Navy SEALs, Ventura sued in 2014 for defamation and won. “I helped with the research and writing, and helped witnesses get where they needed to be,” Hamborg said. The team on that case also won an AOY award.

Hamborg was on another AOY-winning team, one that gathered evidence of a multimillion-dollar fraud scheme at Eden Prairie hearing aid company Starkey Laboratories. “I did a great deal of document review in that case,” Hamborg said. The evidence gathered led to convictions of the company’s president and the CEO of one of its suppliers, and guilty pleas for two other executives.

“I enjoy drafting legal arguments and coming up with nuanced ways to advocate for my clients,” Hamborg said. “That part is fun for me.”

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