Three directors of Cobb EMC will deliver a report Monday that could alter the course of an 8-month-old customer lawsuit against the Marietta-based electric co-op.

The directors are members of a special litigation committee studying the lawsuit's allegations of financial misconduct at the co-op.

On Monday, the committee will say whether it found those allegations valid.

It could lead to a recommendation that Cobb County Superior Court Judge Stephen Schuster dismiss the lawsuit.

The committee could also recommend that the co-op negotiate a settlement with suing customers or even join them in suing co-op management and directors.

Schuster has asked the parties to be ready for trial in October.

Lawyers for the suing customers have said any recommendation of the committee wil be flawed because the panel includes two defendants in the case and therefore lacks independence.

Cobb EMC is a non-profit, customer-owned power provider serving about 190,000 members in Atlanta's northwest suburbs.

Customers sued on the co-op's behalf last October, saying the utility's management and board members allowed its assets to be siphoned off by a for-profit affiliate called Cobb Energy.

Cobb EMC has vehemently denied the charges, saying its relationship with Cobb Energy strengthened the cooperative's bottom line.

The EMC challenged the suing customers' standing to bring the suit and formed the special litigation committee to investigate the claims.

Special litigation committees are typical in shareholder lawsuits against corporations, said Georgia State University law professor Bill Gregory, who teaches corporate and securities law.

The special committees are intended to weed out frivolous lawsuits, Gregory said, and they recommend lawsuits be dismissed "90 percent of the time."

He said such committees rarely recommend joining a lawsuit on the side of the plaintiffs.

Courts usually heed what the committees recommend, he said, as long as the panels are truly independent of the corporation being sued.

"Usually, what they say goes," Gregory said, "as long as they have found independent people [to serve on the committee] and they act in good faith."

He said some corporations that are being sued let a judge pick the committee members to gurantee neutrality: "They [typically] hire a prominent attorney, a retired judge, an accounting professor."

None of the three directors on Cobb EMC's committee were on its board when the co-op began its relationship with Cobb Energy. Two of them, though, have been on Cobb's board for nine years, and are named as defendants in the lawsuit.

The committee will file its report in Cobb County Superior Court by 3 p.m. Monday.