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Cross-border litigation is often described as a problem of language. A document needs to be translated. A witness needs an interpreter. A Polish record needs to be understood by an English lawyer.
But language is only one part of the picture.
When litigation involves a Polish client, Polish witnesses or evidence located in Poland, cultural differences can affect the evidence itself — what a person tells their solicitor, what they regard as important, and even what they consider to be evidence at all. Understanding this doesn’t mean making assumptions about Polish clients. It means being alert to the possibility that something which looks insignificant from an English perspective may carry a very different meaning in the client’s life.
In my experience, this matters most in personal injury claims, Court of Protection matters and other cases where a detailed understanding of someone’s circumstances is required.
Care does not always look like care
One of the clearest examples is family care following a serious injury.
In England and Wales, assessing care needs usually means asking how much help someone requires with washing, dressing, cooking or shopping. But the answers can look very different depending on how the family understands its own responsibilities.
In some Polish families, relatives take over these tasks without ever thinking of it as “care”. A daughter starts doing her injured parent’s laundry. A son cleans the house every week. A sibling brings over home-cooked meals. To the family, this is simply what family members do for one another — not something to be recorded or quantified.
So if a solicitor asks, “Who provides care for you?”, the honest answer may be “Nobody.” Ask instead, “Who does your laundry? Who cleans your home? Who prepares your meals? Who takes you to appointments?” — and an entirely different picture emerges.
The same applies in reverse. Someone who previously cooked for elderly parents, collected children from school or maintained the family home may have lost the ability to do so after their injury. That loss may never be described as “care” being withdrawn, but it’s still part of understanding their pre- and post-injury life.
This is also why strong family involvement can make needs less visible, not more. Families accustomed to looking after one another are often reluctant to bring outside carers into the home — not because the need isn’t there, but because it feels inappropriate or unnecessary when relatives are available. An injured person may appear to be managing without formal care, when in reality that’s only possible because a mother visits every morning and a sister cooks three times a week. The absence of paid care doesn’t mean the absence of care needs — and if a solicitor or expert only sees the final arrangement, it’s easy to underestimate what’s actually going on.
Attitudes towards public authorities can affect evidence
Cultural differences also shape how clients deal with public institutions.
In Poland, there has traditionally been a strong tendency to simply accept what an official tells you, with little sense that a decision could be challenged or appealed. That’s changing, particularly among younger generations, but the shift is gradual and far from universal. For some clients, if an official says something, that’s simply the position — it doesn’t occur to them to ask whether it was correct.
This has real consequences. A person might ask a public authority whether they’re entitled to a benefit, be told (incorrectly) that they aren’t, and simply not apply. By the time the mistake comes to light, they may have lost months of support — and recovering that loss from the authority afterwards can be extremely difficult.
To someone accustomed to accepting official information at face value, not applying doesn’t seem unusual at all. This matters when investigating a client’s history: the absence of an application or appeal doesn’t necessarily mean the person didn’t need the benefit or made an informed choice not to pursue it. It may simply mean they trusted advice they had no reason to doubt.
Documents don’t always tell the full story
It’s worth remembering that Poland isn’t culturally uniform. Someone who has spent their life in Warsaw or Kraków may have a very different relationship with healthcare, employment and public services than someone from a small village — and a description of Polish life based on city experience may say little about what’s realistically available to someone returning to a rural community. Distance, transport and family support all shape what’s actually accessible, not just what technically exists.
The same gap can appear in formal records more generally. A registered address may not be where someone actually lives. A property may be registered to one family member but maintained by another. A neighbour, rather than a listed relative, may be the one providing real day-to-day support. In these situations the useful question often isn’t “what does the document say?” but “what is actually happening?” — which can mean speaking to people who know the individual, visiting a property, or making direct local enquiries.
Asking better questions, not making assumptions
None of this means assuming every Polish client behaves the same way. Not every family provides extensive informal care; not every client distrusts public authorities; not every rural community looks alike — and Polish clients who have spent most of their lives in England may identify far more with British institutional norms than Polish ones.
The point of cultural awareness isn’t to replace questions with assumptions. It’s to ask better questions:
- If a client says nobody provides care, ask what actually happens in their home each day.
- If a client says they didn’t appeal a decision, ask what they were told and what they understood their options to be.
- If a client says they could return to Poland because family is there, ask who those people are, where they live, and what they could realistically provide.
The cultural context helps identify the right questions. The evidence still has to answer them.
Beyond translation
Translation gets information across a language barrier. Cultural understanding helps make sure that information is properly understood in context — and for foreign firms handling Polish evidence, that difference can matter a great deal to the outcome of a case.
At LSSP, I assist UK solicitors with evidence gathering and litigation support in Poland, including witness tracing, witness statements, factual enquiries and local investigations into practical circumstances on the ground.
Sometimes the most useful evidence isn’t found in a translated document. Sometimes it starts with asking a different question.