A cassation appeal in the Polish Civil Procedure Code is an extraordinary means of appealing second-instance court judgments on the merits to the Supreme Court. However, not all judgments ending the proceedings on the merits are appealable, as the
legislator has introduced subject and amount limitations. In this way, a first barrier has been introduced to counteract the excessive inflow of cases to the Supreme Court. The second barrier is the very restrictive formal requirements that a complaint must meet
in order to be considered admissible; this includes the compulsion of a lawyer. The third stage of the examination of the cassation appeal is the so-called pre-court, in which the existence of cassation grounds is examined. The author analyses cassation grounds as
an extra-Code concept, rightly introduced, however, in the pre-court literature due to the importance that the legislator attributes to the various stages of the examination of a cassation appeal in civil proceedings. This stage serves the purpose of selection of ap-
peals in terms of their importance and usefulness for cognizance by common courts also of other cases with analogous legal problems