§ 872.640.Consideration of Interest of Unknown Parties

When unknown parties get joined under §§ 872.520 or 872.550, the court sometimes can't meaningfully sort out how those unknown parties' interests relate to each other -- there may be no way to know who among them owns what share. This section lets the court sidestep that impossible task: where two or more parties are unknown, it may consider their interests together in the action, rather than trying to determine their interests as between one another.

That approach keeps the case moving without forcing the court to guess at relationships it has no evidence to establish. If those unknown parties or their claims later become identifiable, any internal division of the interest the court treated collectively would presumably be worked out separately, outside the scope of what this section requires the court to resolve here.