Print The warning signs about Tom Girardi flashed year after year, allegations that he skimmed settlement money, inflated costs, abandoned clients and cheated colleagues. The vaunted Los Angeles trial lawyer, a regular on “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” and his firm were sued more than a hundred times between the 1980s and last year, with at least half of those cases asserting misconduct in his law practice. Yet through it all, Girardi’s record with the State Bar of California, the government agency that regulates attorneys, remained pristine. The bar took no action to warn the public despite receiving what The Times has learned were multiple complaints. That spotless license allowed him to continue marketing himself as one of the nation’s most renowned civil lawyers, and to sign up thousands of new clients, some of whom would later say he absconded with millions of dollars of their settlement money.