This article focuses on the characteristic problems and specificity of family companies, emphasizing the importance of family company law as a complex and comprehensive area of practice, mainly in the field of commercial law. This article also draws attention to selected problems in the field of company law dogmatic regarding family companies. The analysis carried out in the article leads to the conclusion that the law of enterprises and family companies, due to the specific problems of family companies, should become the subject of increased interest in the Polish doctrine of company law. However, there is no need to adapt Polish company law to the needs of family companies, because the vast majority of problems related to their functioning can be solved on the basis of applicable law.

This article opens a series of articles on the need to separate under Polish commercial and company law the law of family enterprises and family companies, as it is postulated in the German and Austrian corporate law doctrine. This article draws attention to the economic importance of enterprises and family companies in Poland, Germany and Austria, discusses the state of recognition of this issue in German, Austrian and Polish doctrine, and presents two basic definitional approaches to the issue of enterprises and family companies: the notion of an enterprise and a family company in a broad and in the strict sense. The confrontation of these two definitions of an enterprise and a family company leads to the conclusion that for understanding, analyzing and exploring the issues of family companies, the concept of a family company in the strict sense is essential and authoritative, which refers to the essence of family companies and the subjective element constituting them, which is the will of the founder/founders of a family business to run and continue the company for the next generations as a family business in a way that ensures its independence and multi-generational durability.

The aim of this article is to look at the new type of foundation introduced into the Polish legal system in the form of a family foundation not only from the perspective of the advantages of this organizational and legal form raised by the Project Initiator, but also the threats perceived in the German doctrine that it may entail. These threats can be defined collectively as the "dark side" of the family foundation. The article omits the assessment of this new legal institution from the tax law perspective, focusing mainly on its private-law aspects.