Decision of the Court of Appeals in Gdansk 5th Civil Division of 14th May 2013
V ACz 354/13

1. Standardisation may be performed in subgroups consisting of no fewer than two persons. The point is for the simplifications related to examining the case in the present proceedings not to be frustrated by the need to assess fragmented and different claims of each of the claimants. Deciding to conduct the dispute in these proceedings, a part of the claimants must take the inability to pursue their claims in full amount when other claimant’s claims are smaller into account. The standardisation of claims, being a condition of admissibility of the proceedings at issue, amounts to determination of a lump value of claims for all claimants (at least within the subgroup), not exceeding the lowest claims one of them is entitled to.
2. For the needs of standardisation of claims, it is assumed that it may take place if common circumstances of the case support the standardisation. One may assume that the issue here is such circumstances of the case which are shared, and therefore identical, for the group’s members and at the same time different than those which decided on formation of other groups.
3. Formation of individual groups should be decided not by the very value of the same claims, resulting e.g. from different shares in joint property, but by other circumstances decisive for the different nature of these claims. Otherwise, the division at issue would not so much serve the possibility to pursue claims in these proceedings in general, as it would protect members of the subgroups against the necessity of standardisation of the value of the claims being pursued according to disadvantageous principles related to the necessity to resign on a part of the claim in a manner unaccepted by them.
4. If the claims pursued by the claimants share the same factual and legal basis, and they are different only in terms of the amount of each of them connected to the share in the joint property of shared premises, claims should be standardised between all claimants. In such a case, admissibility of forming groups only with the view of avoiding inconvenience related to the necessity to resign on a part of the claim and standardising it to the one pursued by another of claimants with the lowest claim is excluded.