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Eaton Corp., CEO Alexander Cutler and others named as defendants in lawsuit filed by fired Eaton attorney in long-winding trade-secrets dispute. Shown here is the headquarters of Eaton's U.S. operations in the Chagrin Highlands development in Beachwood.

(Plain Dealer file photo)

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A former Eaton Corp. attorney says the company fired her to help with a cover-up that defrauded a Mississippi court -– a “civil conspiracy” that included Eaton Chief Executive Alexander Cutler, according to a lawsuit filed late Monday in Cleveland.

Former Eaton in-house lawyer Sharon O’Flaherty, 57, of Concord Township in Lake County, says in the lawsuit

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that Cutler, Eaton general counsel Mark McGuire and other lawyers made her take the fall for their missteps in a rancorous, nearly decade-long legal battle between Eaton and rival Frisby Aerospace.

O’Flaherty

as the case in Hinds County Circuit Court in Mississippi zeroed in on who was to blame for the belated delivery of two emails that Eaton was supposed to give the court in 2008.

Eaton “publicly and falsely stated” that it fired O’Flaherty to help restore Eaton’s integrity and commitment to excellence, her lawsuit in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court contends.

In fact, the suit says, Eaton terminated O’Flaherty to defraud the court about why it failed to produce relevant emails, and because O’Flaherty, “unlike others in the Eaton legal department,” had preserved damaging evidence and tried to comply with the court’s order.

Eaton issued a statement Tuesday saying it refuted O’Flaherty’s claims and would respond to them at the appropriate time.

”It is our policy to keep personnel matters confidential, therefore we will not comment regarding our former employees,” the Fortune 200 company said. “Consistent with our policy, Eaton will not comment further on this litigation.”

Eaton, Cutler, McGuire, O’Flaherty’s former supervisor Vic Leo, outside law firm Latham & Watkins, as well as its New York managing partner, James Brandt, are named as defendants in the lawsuit.

The email strings mentioned throughout O’Flaherty’s complaint are part of a mountain of pleadings, testimony and evidence that for years has sidetracked the

against Frisby and six former Eaton engineers in 2004. Eaton claimed the engineers stole aerospace information and gave it to their new employer, Frisby. The two companies compete for military and commercial contracts.

A handful of emails became a hot point in the case because they mentioned attorney Ed Peters and Hinds County Circuit Court Judge Bobby DeLaughter, who first presided over the litigation.

Frisby has said the emails show that Eaton lawyers knew the company was using Peters, a former Hinds County prosecutor and DeLaughter’s mentor, to secretly lobby DeLaughter on Eaton’s behalf.

The judge who followed DeLaughter on the lawsuit, W. Swan Yerger,

after concluding Eaton and its lawyers knew or should have known that Peters was manipulating the judicial system.

Cutler and in-house lawyers at company headquarters in Cleveland have said there was no hint that Peters was doing anything that crossed the line. They said they hired Peters at the suggestion of outside counsel. Leo, Eaton's former head of litigation, said the recommendation came from Reuben Anderson, a past Mississippi Supreme Court justice who was on the company’s legal team in Hinds County.

When Eaton turned over what it said were two newly discovered emails in 2012,

that O’Flaherty accidentally missed them when searching for Peters/DeLaughter documents.

In fact, O’Flaherty’s suit says, she gave highlighted print-outs of the emails in a folder to Leo after she found them in a search of her computer. The emails weren’t directed to O’Flaherty but she had been copied on them and they were on her hard drive.

Meanwhile, O’Flaherty was falsely informed that the computers of other top attorneys were being electronically searched by Eaton’s IT department, her suit says. In fact, Leo had ordered the department not to search computers, according to O’Flaherty’s 32-page complaint.

An IT employee, Jeff Miller, “believed Leo’s instruction had a nefarious purpose” and consulted with his supervisor about it, the lawsuit says. The supervisor consulted with his boss, Chief Information Officer Bill Blausey, who consulted with Eaton’s general counsel, McGuire.

Eventually, the question was kicked up to Eaton’s ethics office, according to O’Flaherty’s lawsuit.

“Eaton’s ethics office instructed… that in the future, hard drive images should be searched for emails but that, in this case, they should follow Leo’s instruction not to search for emails,” the complaint says.

By May 2012, the Hinds County Circuit Court was pushing Eaton to explain the email hold-up.

Cutler, McGuire and several other lawyers met with James Brandt of Latham & Watkins, which was hired to help Eaton get to the bottom of the lapses.

“Eaton, Cutler, McGuire and/or Brandt” had reason to suspect that Leo had intentionally removed two emails from the folder O’Flaherty gave him, her suit alleges.

They also had knowledge that Leo specifically instructed the IT department not to have computer hard drives searched, her suit claims.

“Cutler, McGuire and/or Brandt” decided at a May 15 meeting or earlier to fire O’Flaherty and Leo and to defraud the Mississippi court and Frisby by claiming the email mistake was due to inadvertence on O’Flaherty’s part, the suit says.

Leo, reached Tuesday, said he didn’t set aside emails that O’Flaherty gave him and never ordered the IT department not to search computers.

An Eaton internal investigation concluded there was no evidence of intentional wrongdoing on Leo or anyone's part, Leo said, adding that he was fired only for negligently supervising electronic discovery.

“If Sharon is insinuating in this lawsuit that I removed documents from that folder that she gave me, that conflicts with the affidavit that she gave back in May of last year and it conflicts with the statement that she gave to the investigators, Latham & Watkins,” he said.

O'Flaherty's suit seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages, and payment of her attorney fees.