Now, I can see if she wanted to take a few key e-mails out because any lawsuit needs some evidence or it might be quashed in summary judgement. So maybe that's what she thought she was doing, but it sounds like she grabbed a lot more than that. I would also really be wary of this because people can get death threats when e-mail that they thought was company internal are leaked out. I wouldn't be surprised that a bunch of e-mails will make it into a lawsuit with the people's names on them. Anyone knows that lawsuits can easily take an e-mail out of context to make it say something that is changed by the context around it. Even worse, company internal e-mails probably have a tremendous amount of internal company information.
There is no way that any company will just shrug and go, well if you sent it to yourself and your lawyer, then that it's okay that you might have sent out company secrets.