Managing Attorney

PL's Managing Attorney Aida Poulsen, in addition to a legal profession, is a business-savvy executive with a record of developing a number of law firms, a management consulting firm, an international trading company from scratch to a significant market share; holding positions from CEO and board chair to venture capital and private equity investments.

 

The past biggest projects were Whales Legal, a law firm-conveyer for banking mergers and acquisitions, and Whales Group, a trading platform for banking M&As. The group was featured in Forbes, FT, WSJ, and on economic forums as capturing a significant share of the market of indirect banking mergers and acquisitions. The Whales technology required a layered secure access to a set of highly confidential proprietary databases, with a core database being divorced from the offices’ network and hardware.

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Within the couple of years following the launch of Poulsen Law P.C., a firm in complex litigation based in New York and California, the firm was managing over a hundred complex, expert-dense cases; achieved dozens of settlements, initiated a number of class actions, recovered millions of dollars for its clients, and launched cooperations with nationwide class action firms.

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A daughter of a prominent human rights attorney, Aida began her career defending innocent people back in the USSR as a litigator in criminal and civil matters, including appeals, up to the Supreme Court of the country. With the Perestroika arrival, she self-tought herself English and took on business litigation and international trade arbitration.

 

She became a winner of Presidents’ Management Training Initiative held under the auspices of President George Bush, Prime Minister Tony Blair, and President Yeltsin, for transforming a domestic airport into an international one, in order to launch her own international charter flights. Aida served pro-bono as President of the British Alumni Club with the British Embassy in Moscow from 2002 to 2007.

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​However, Aida quickly became an oppositioner to the new Putin's regime, published opposition papers, including on the Michail Khodorkovsky's trial, and gave a speaking platform in the British Embassy for opposition leaders and dissidents, including the late Eltsin's Acting Prime Minister Egor Gaidar, World Chess Champion Gary Kasparov, a Don Quixote of human rights Valeria Novodvorskaya (jailed 17 times for anti-Soviet views), after which had to escape the regime, accomplishing it by applying to Stanford.

 

After moving to Palo Alto and completing an executive course at Stanford Graduate School of Business (2006), Aida worked in Silicon Valley with a number of tech startups as an investor and a CEO.

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Aida is an avid advocate of healthy living, a journalist who has published countless important essays and appearances in multiple countries. She is a recipient of a scholarship of American Association of Magazine Editors (AAME) to the Yale’s publishing program. 

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As an executive, Aida periodically attends graduate business schools and has completed, in addition to Stanford's and Yale's excutive programs, the MIT's Media Lab Cryptocurrency Program, authored and taught by the SEC chair and MIT professor Gary Gensler.