Managing Attorney

PL's Managing Attorney Aida Poulsen, in addition to a legal profession, is a business-savvy executive. Beyond litigation, Aida has launched and scaled multiple ventures—including law firms, a management consulting company, and an international trading platform—growing them from the ground up to significant market share; holding positions from CEO and board chair to venture capital and private equity investments.

The Bench Build

In the age where most lawyers use AI as a hardly reliable chat bot, Aida uses AI scientific research, and a wide range of tools and models to build the trial, appellate and Supreme Court panels. And then stress-test them on multiple foundational models of different families to brutalize her own and her firm's arguments. And then again against top commercial AI tools. The latter concede to the AI Bench's expertise and their utter lack of sycophancy so far.

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Across a string of essays, she has argued, with the specificity of someone who actually did the math, that the profession's real fault line is an inability to brutalize their own argument: "the divide will be between lawyers (including judges) who use AI as a chatbot and lawyers who use it to stress test their own work":

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Agentic Legal Systems

Brilliant Mind With Gaps

The Age of Agentic Judicial Intelligence

Courtroom Meets Singularity

Brutalize Your Argument

Build your Own Bench

AI Rules Have Arrived

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AI Bench​

The result, AI Bench, is a seventeen-judge simulated bench replicated on different foundational models — five trial-court temperaments, five Court of Appeal justices, seven Supreme Court minds, then multiplied and stress-tested by a different model — where each jurist has completed a heightened bar exam (not the one lawyers take, but a much higher memory and reasoning test that exceeds the knowledge and reasoning of a Harvard Civ Pro professor) and is an independently reasoning AI agent with its own reading habits and none of the same politics. Blind by construction (no framing, no party names, no hint of who ordered the review), the panels read the actual filings, pull the full text of every cited authority, hunt for the controlling case both sides missed, and vote — issue by issue, party by party — before a single word reaches a real judge.

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Every simulated justice must argue against its own vote. Every citation is checked against the reporters in multiple rounds — for hallucinations and for accuracy of interpretation and application to the facts. And every percentage ships with the caveat that it's a structured self-report, not a calibrated probability, because, as Poulsen puts it, "a prediction tool that tells you what you want to hear is a liability with a subscription fee." Poulsen argues that then a human lawyer must again read every case, every opinion and verify the findings with their own reasoning, and run again the finished brief against the same panels, and verify again: it is their bar license on the line, not the machine's.

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The system has already earned its keep in live matters: systemically out-arguing a number of top commercial legal-AI tools, catching a filing deadline a human panelist miscalculated by a day, surfacing a footnote reservation buried in an opinion that became the spine of a rehearing petition, preventing filing a weakened brief, strengthening the reversal chances from 47.2 to 66.7%, and more. In blind testing for another law firm on already completed briefing that cannot be changed, the bench delivered the sentence every litigator dreads and every client needs to hear — "your appeal is a coin-flip and your subsidiary theory is a 5–0 loser" — complete with the numbers and the oral-argument plan to move the votes.

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None of it replaces the lawyer, and Aida is emphatic about that in every essay and every memo the system produces: the simulated justice predicts, the real one decides, and knowing the difference is the product. What AI Bench replaces is the gut-check, nothing more and nothing less — the "we're probably 60/40" a litigator used to carry around unverified until the ruling came down. Now it gets stress-tested first, by the brilliant judicial minds who have read everything, forget nothing, and have no stake whatsoever in being liked.

Law in Motion

Among her most notable ventures are Whales Legal, a law firm in banking mergers and acquisitions, and Whales Group, a proprietary banking M&A trading platform. Whales was featured in Forbes, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, and at major economic forums for its impact on the indirect banking M&A market.​

 

Since founding Poulsen Law, a complex litigation boutique specializing in science-heavy cases, operating in New York, California and other states, Aida has led the firm in managing over 100 complex, expert-intensive cases. The firm has secured millions of dollars in recoveries, initiated and settled class actions, and established collaborations with leading national class-action firms—all within just a few years of its inception.​​

Human Rights Legacy

Aida credits her fervor to a deep humility for lifelong learning, the cultural DNA of her mother—an unyielding human rights attorney and bar chair later in her career—and the sharp intellect and exceptional education of her grandfather and uncle, both judges. She began her own legal career in the USSR, litigating criminal and civil cases, up to the Supreme Court. With the onset of Perestroika, she taught herself English and took on business litigation and international trade arbitration.

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She was a winner of the Presidents’ Management Training Initiative, organized under the auspices of President Bill Clinton, Prime Minister Tony Blair, and President Boris Yeltsin. She earned it for transforming a domestic airport into an international one, enabling her to launch her own international charter flights.​​

Ethics Under Pressure

​​A vocal critic of Vladimir Putin’s regime, Aida published opposition essays, including on the politically charged trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky. From 2002 to 2007, she served pro bono as President of the British Alumni Club at the British Embassy in Moscow, where she provided a speaking platform and organized embassy forums for leading dissidents — all at the risk to her freedom. Among her guest speakers were:

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• Egor Gaidar, Acting Prime Minister under Boris Yeltsin

• Garry Kasparov, World Chess Champion and opposition leader

• Valeria Novodvorskaya, Aida’s personal hero and an iconic human rights activist jailed 17 times for anti-Soviet dissent who predicted the invasion of Ukraine by Putin.​

 

As political danger escalated, Aida was forced to flee Russia—a move she accomplished by gaining admission at Stanford University.

Silicon Valley Ethos

After completing an executive program at Stanford Graduate School of Business (2006), she worked with a number of tech startups in Silicon Valley, serving as both an investor and CEO.

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She continues her executive education at other top institutions, including:

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• Yale Publishing Program, as an AAME Scholar (American Association of Magazine Editors)

• MIT Media Lab’s Blockchain Program, taught by the former SEC Chair Gary Gensler

• Additional coursework at Stanford GSB, Yale, and other graduate business programs​.​

Perspective​

A lifelong advocate for healthy living—as well as a figure skater and skier—Aida credits much of her resilience, focus, and clarity in approaching challenges to the rigor of athletic training.

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Her humility and ability to connect—with clients, her teams, her charitable projects, the people she supports, and even adversaries—stem from a guiding belief she coined from Michail Bulgakov: “There are no bad people—only the unfortunate,” with the idea that misfortune, rather than innate malice, often drives human behavior.