The Handling of Business Lawsuits by Common Courts in Poland: Identification of Transaction Costs

Abstract

The aim of the article is to identify factors influencing the transaction costs of the enforcement of contracts concluded between entrepreneurs in business matters. For the purpose of the article, a pilot study was conducted involving 210 court cases pending before the District Court in Gdańsk in the first instance after 2009, in which the judgment was issued in 2012 (the last 210 cases) and for which the appeal was lodged to the Appeals Court in Gdańsk and the proceedings were concluded before 2013. The conducted case study was to identify factors influencing the transaction costs of contractual rights on the supply side, i.e. as part of court activity. Transaction costs of contract enforcement include not only the costs of court fees and legal representation, which are defined normatively, but also – and what is obvious – the time necessary to exercise rights under the contract. The study attempted to answer two research questions. First, which factors influence the time of consideration of the case, from the moment it reaches the court of first instance up to the second-instance judgment, and second – to what extent the level of complexity of the case is correlated with the time of its examination. The results enabled preselecting the basic factors that identify the level of complexity of the case. It was assumed in this article that they include: the number of volumes accumulated throughout the examination of the case, the number of hearings, and the number of pages of justification of the first- and second-instance judgment.