Decision of the Court of Appeals in Krakow, 1st civil Division of 7th December 2011
I ACz 1235/11

1. The legislator’s reference in Article 1 section 1 of the Act to the notion of the claim requires to point out that the Court of the lower instance correctly identified this notion as a claim in the procedural, and not substantive law sense.
2. Standardisation cannot only take on the form homogenous for all the group members damages amounts exclusively in the reference to the same or similar (equal) factual basis of all claims required by Article 1 section 1 of the Act. It is also necessary for such a standardisation to occur on the basis of the common [in the case at hand – for subgroup members circumstances of the case provided for in Article 2 section 1 in fine of the Act.
3. Standardisation, in relation to subgroup members, having its source in factual circumstances of the case, excludes ordering in the frames of subgroups those who seek claims for compensation of detriments to their assets (damage) of varied nature, that is e.g. those which consist only in an actual damage, those which adopted also this form and consist in lost profits, if their situation, both factual and legal, is substantially different. Unjustifiably also such entities were included within those whose losses in assets pertain to that which serves the satisfaction of their broadly understood residential needs and those whose substance designed for conducting their business operations was destroyed by water after the bursting of the Wisła River food bank in Sandomierz – Koćmierzów. The standardisation required by the legislator pertains not only to the value of claims, but [should] also be a consequence of one type of a damage to assets or damage resulting from facts shared by subgroup members and deciding on the objective similarity of losses.