Abstract

The deliveries correctly performed in the course of civil proceedings are a precondition for maintaining the legality of the entire process, including the equality of rights to be ensured for both parties. That is why it is accepted in jurisprudence that the procedural provisions concerning deliveries are obligatory, which excludes freedom of the parties as regards how pleadings are to be served.
Violation of the procedural provisions concerning deliveries carries a risk of depriving a party of the possibility to defend their rights, which in consequence could end in a mistrial.
Given such crucial importance of the institution of deliveries, it is justified to analyse the legal regulation of deliveries provided for in the Code of Civil Procedure, in particular their exceptional form - so-called direct deliveries. Opinions formulated by representatives of the civil procedural doctrine and practicians indicate that there exist many doubts in this respect, which are a source of the risk for a party to perform a procedural act incorrectly, and if such a risk does come true, many a time it adversely affects the entire proceedings.
Given the vagueness of the legal regulation and at the same time crucial practical importance of this issue, the article presents selected major cases of doubts occurring in the area of direct deliveries and their resolutions put forward in the statements of the judicature.
In one of the judgments cited in the article, the Supreme Court expressed, inter alia, a conviction that the introduction of autonomous deliveries is in no case a consequence of piling up ever new formal requirements aimed at catching a professional attorney in doing something against the formal requirements, but a manifestation of confidence in the reliability and professionality of those who are authorised to perform them.
However, in practice, a conviction seems to predominate that as a consequence of the imprecise regulation of direct deliveries professional attorneys run a risk of procedural ineffectiveness due to the fact that it is impossible to decide unequivocally what types of pleadings are to be delivered directly.
The reflections contained in the article may lead to a conclusion that it should be postulated to create a precise, closed catalogue of pleadings to be excluded from the mechanism of autonomous deliveries, which should definitively dispel any doubts put forward in this respect by representatives of the theory and practice of civil proceedings.