Following the development and expansion of the human community, states were forced to form a judicial system as a guarantor of the justice of those relations that began to form among the original peoples. In the beginning, private law protection was aimed at defending individuals whose right and interests were violated by someone else's offensive treatment. Prior to an adequate judicial system, individuals independently and unregulatedly defended their own interests. Later, it was attempted to provide equal treatment to all parties on the way to a fair outcome of the dispute before the created judicial bodies. Due to the rapid industrialization and growth of trade, the social community became better connected. Society now had to find a way to protect not only the individual interests, but also those rights and interests that have become inherent in the wider collective. Historically speaking, continental-european legal orders (civil law) did not know such procedures, whereas they appeared in Anglo-Saxon law as early as the Middle Ages. Such adjustments have resulted in a multitude of different procedures and arrangements and also terminology of lawsuits to protect collective rights and interests. From lawsuits by representative groups in the early English law, to class action lawsuits in America. The joint lawsuit in the German law significantly influenced the development of collective protection in Croatia. The concept of a joint action was primarily adopted by the reception of European Union law, appearing first in consumer protection and then in anti-discrimination law. Later, the Law on Civil Procedure appointed a general framework for raising the collective procedures of our law. In this paper, the author will primarily attempt to question the scope of the development of active legitimacy for instituting collective litigation, from the earliest forms of development, to today's recent regulations of Croatian law and the European Union. It is evident that there are disputable points in the existing case law regarding the basic characteristics of collective protection. Authorised persons do not make sufficient use of the institute. A lack of education and fear of high concession costs increase inactivity. Further passivity of the parties involved needs to be prevented, so that the right to protection of collective rights and interests in Croatia could be fully realized