Decision of the Regional Court in Warsaw 25th Civil Division of 2nd April 2015
XXV C 148/14

1. The notion of the “claim”, used in Article 1 of the Act of 17 December 2009 on Pursuing Claims in Group Proceedings appears there in the meaning of a procedural demand. It does not occur in the substantive law meaning, by which one should exclusively understand the possibility of demanding a certain person to act in a specific manner.
2. We are dealing with an equal (similar) factual basis of claims if many similar factual events occur (similarity of events). This situation may not be reduced only to an assessment whether factual circumstances common for the entire group dominate individual circumstances pertaining to individual members of the group.
3. Factual circumstances substantiating claims pursued within the frames of group proceedings may fulfil premises of various provisions of civil law, since in relation to the preconditions of group proceedings, there is no requirement for a legal relationship between the claims raised to exist. Various legal bases of tortious liability do not constitute an obstacle in allowing the case to be heard in group proceedings.
4. The possibility of standardising the value of pecuniary claims in subgroups is a necessary solution for a situation, in which the legal basis of the claims pursued by members of the group are different, which simultaneously may (but does not have to) entail differences in the value of the demanded amount.
5. It is inadmissible at the stage of the preliminary examination of the admissibility of hearing the case for the court to relate directly to the assessment of content-related prerequisites of the action and engage in evaluative considerations concerning, for example, circumstances substantiating the existence and type of the causal link between the damage and the defendant’s conduct. Verification of the circumstances provided in the substantiation of the statement of claims that justify the allowing of the claim is the object of evidentiary proceedings at the stage of content-related examination of the case.
6. An excessively narrow interpretation of provisions of the Act of 17 December 2009 on Pursuing Claims in Group Proceedings, leading to the elimination of its applicability to claims for which it was created, is obviously inadmissible.