On appeal, we showed that the court judgment relied on a room that officially does not exist at all

The clients co-own a flat together with another co-owner, but the parties were unable to agree on how each family would use the separate rooms. The first-instance court determined the arrangements for use, but did so rather oddly – it allocated a basement for the parties' shared use, even though the Real Property Register data made it clear that no basement at all was registered as part of the flat – the court disposed of it as if it existed legally, although no one in the case had even proved that it belonged to the flat.

In the appeal, we also drew attention to another inconsistency: in determining the arrangements for use, the court had in fact granted parts of both the claim and the counterclaim concerning the same rooms that both parties had asked in their proposals to be allocated to them individually – thereby passing over the very essence of the dispute and imposing an arrangement that neither party had requested in that specific form.

The appellate court accepted our arguments: it held that allocating the basement for shared use had no legal basis and set aside that part of the judgment, and it changed the arrangements for use, determining them according to the shares actually held by the parties and the floor plan options they themselves had submitted in the case – for the clients, this meant more comfortable living space than had been awarded at first instance.

The case is a reminder that even a court judgment may rest on an assumption that, on closer examination of public registers, simply does not correspond to reality – sometimes the strongest argument on appeal lies not in complex legal theory but in careful fact-checking.