Duquesne Kline student wins CUBE Innovators Invitational

The business idea, sprung from a class project she took this past fall in the Coding for Lawyers Course designed by Professors Wesley Oliver and Morgan Gray, L’19. This Duquesne Kline School of Law course is one of less than a handful of courses of this nature offered across the country at law schools. In that class, she worked as a team with groupmates Samuel Baycer, 2L; Benjamin Eaton, 2L; and Jesse Nelms, 2L on initially developing a tool to make property assessment easier to define and fairer.

“I had been thinking about it for a year or so. The idea happened selfishly when I was buying a house. As a first-time homebuyer, you finance for mortgage and rainy-day funds, then you get hit with a property tax bill around closing. I got surprised. I knew but didn’t understand the whole process, or how you can appeal this. I investigated that to see if we were given fair tax assessment,” said Patel.

What she learned was that Allegheny County was part of a major lawsuit in the Court of Common Pleas about this subject. “The Court found that Allegheny County had an inflated Common Level Ratio. This ultimately meant a higher tax bill for those whose assessments were after 2012. When we took the Coding for Lawyers class, we started to toss around the idea of a practical tool for homeowners and lawyers through coding. We were learning how to manipulate data and found that Allegheny County provides an Excel spreadsheet of property assessment data,” she said.

In their research, they learned there is not a product like P.A.A.T. on the market. The group took this burgeoning idea and tried to make a real-world tool from it, something to aid taxpayers, law firms, and those who handle a high volume of property taxes annually.  “We all agreed this was something practical. This past fall, we built part one, the analyzer. It uses factors of home, square footage, size, etc.,” Patel said.

“This is so everyone pays their fair share. If your property tax is inflated, it is not like a personal income tax where you receive a refund if you overpay. The burden is on the homeowner to know whether an appeal is appropriate, and that process can be intimidating,” Patel said.

Her team developed an initial prototype for the project. After the class, Professor Ella Kwisnek informed her of the CUBE competition. Patel, with the blessing of her group, decided to further develop the project into a business plan to compete.

According to Patel’s Executive Summary in her business plan, the tool “serves to provide an initial predictive assessment value and allows attorneys and homeowners to build evidence packets necessary for an appeal hearing.”

Her plan and subsequent win is a facet of what Professor Oliver was hoping law students would glean from his class, a new way of looking at legal challenges.

“Natasha is one of the many students that exemplifies in best possible way what we are hoping to do. She didn’t have any computer science background but was interested enough to take the course and found it interesting. She grabbed this thing and ran with it,” said Professor Oliver. 

Patel, who received a cash prize as part of her win, wants to put that money toward getting P.A.A.T. to the market.  

She said, “Ideally the goal is to develop it into phase 1 and test the prototype in Pittsburgh. We need to work out the legal and technical issues and test it out in a few firms. The tax cycle ended on March 31; we will run those numbers to see how accurate we can get the model. The goal is to do same the testing in other cities to work out different codes. It will be an accessible tool for law firms that take on a high volume of property tax appeals. It will take minutes for a lawyer to run these numbers, versus potential hours. The goal is getting a marketable product.”