Cardinal Intellectual Property Reviews

Very significant concerns here: Cardinal IP is directed by a strongly autocratic culture (several/majority of the upper management personnel are from India) that many employees find disconcerting, inconsistent, reactive, and occasionally downright rude. Missives sent out by one of those individuals always makes self-reference as "the management" in the third person. Petty, yes, but annoying nonetheless. Another significant concern: government contracting work--PCT patent searches--require relentless attention to detail that is not remotely ADEQUATELY compensated in the $300 per application pay, which can take up to several days to earn. Those who do this work struggle to reach the $40,000's, usually less. Let it be known to all outsiders: only those in a supervisory position who receive a review fee for each case they oversee, can expect to see a penny more. A little on-line searching will locate testimonials to this effect. And that requires 2 or more years of service. No benefits, a cranky virtual private network that goes offline during peak work hours, and an expectation of being available to receive non-essential emails even on weekends, rounds out the experience. This work is not analytical. It will NOT teach or burnish analytical skills. It will NOT bolster your resume', unless your next move is to a PTO searcher assignment. As a final FYI, essentially NONE of the managerial employees with a PTO patent agent or attorney credential are referenced on any issued patents. OK, I found 3 patents co-listing one CIP employee, but those patents were originally authored and filed by someone else. Any outsider can confirm this by running some names from Linked In through the USPTO agent roster. Those who can't practice...search. Cardinal IP is not a place to learn about the patent world. Take heed, nascent patent attorneys. Bottom line: ok place to learn some very limited and very specialized search techniques, at sub-market pay rates, but virtually no portability of those skills.

They don't actually have time to train anyone, since they can't slow done the continuous flow of cases from their contracts. Most of their new hires have never worked with IP before, and are either students fresh out of college or various professionals who were laid off or otherwise had a falling out from their main careers...in other words, people with no long-term career plans. The result is a disorganized workflow and high turnover rate. It seems a matter of routine for people to just walk out, and they continuously interview for replacements. There is a disconnect between HR, the admins and the actual attorneys you work with. CEO Frank seems like a solid professional but as an analyst you won't interact with him at all. There is no real advancement, no such thing as a "senior analyst", you can just make more money by doing more cases but there is a limit to how many you can feasibly do in a given week. HR will promise you the moon in terms of flexibility and payout on eventual higher-value cases, but reality is quite different when you actually work with the attorneys and administrators. If you go in full-time there is a minimum number of cases you are expected to do, which becomes clear well after you join, and if you have a deficit they'll expect you to make it up by taking on more cases per week. There are no transferable skills to learn here beyond some specialized database searching. This is NOT an introduction to the world of IP or patent prosecution. In short, this is a dead-end career move for anyone with a STEM background. If you're in law school or plan to be a patent attorney then maybe it is worth a few months, but after that you can leave and they won't bat an eye when you do and simply replace you with some newly-graduated engineering major with 0 work experience. If you put in 40-50 hours a week you might make between 50-65k annually, if you're lucky. If you're unemployed with bills looming that might seem tempting but this is not a long-term option. There is a small minority of analysts with backgrounds in law who make more, which is natural since they don't require as much training to prepare the required legal documents.