(Reuters) - Attorney disciplinary charges filed against Tom Girardi this week may have come too late for his clients. But they advance the California state bar's mission of deterring future misconduct, and they could help the bar save face after its own prior inaction, legal ethics experts said.

In an 18-page filing in California State Bar Court on Tuesday, the bar's office of chief trial counsel alleged that the famed plaintiffs' attorney misappropriated money owed to clients in three cases, including $2 million in Boeing settlement funds that was supposed to be distributed to the families of four victims of the 2018 Lion Air Flight 610 crash.

Attorneys for Girardi and his now-shuttered law firm, Girardi Keese, have acknowledged in federal court that the Lion Air funds were not distributed.

The state bar had already pulled Girardi's law license in March, citing a Los Angeles state court's order placing him under temporary conservatorship. His brother Robert Girardi, who was appointed his conservator, has asserted that his brother is mentally incompetent, and a psychiatrist said he has Alzheimer's disease.

Robert Girardi's attorney, Nicholas Van Brunt, the team leader of Sheppard Mullin's private wealth services team, did not respond to a request for comment about the state bar's claims.

Given the Alzheimer's diagnosis and the conservatorship, the state bar's revocation of Girardi's license already marked the end of his legal career, regardless of whether it filed disciplinary charges against him, said Tyler Maulsby, a partner specializing in legal ethics at Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz.

"There's no coming back from that," Maulsby said.

Still, legal experts said the state bar has a duty to protect the public from attorneys who have allegedly committed misconduct. Not pursuing disciplinary charges against Girardi could affect future cases, they added.

By charging Girardi, Maulsby said, the state bar is communicating to other lawyers that it will come after them regardless of their career status.

"Just because someone is at the end of their career doesn't excuse them from compliance with the rules of the profession," said Emil Ali, a professional responsibility partner at McCabe & Ali.

And it's not just attorneys who are at the end of their careers who could take advantage if the bar didn't take action - young attorneys could similarly argue that their future career shouldn't be burdened by a mistake, Ali continued.

"It would be a cop-out for everyone" if the bar didn't pursue charges, Ali said.

The filing of charges comes weeks after the Los Angeles Times reported that Girardi's chummy relationship with state bar officials enabled him to maintain a clear disciplinary record despite past allegations of misconduct.

"It may not have been the best play, but from a PR perspective, this was probably the right play," Ali said of the timing of the charges against Girardi.

Pressed for comment, a state bar spokeswoman noted that the bar earlier this month disclosed that it began investigating Girardi in December. The spokeswoman did not address the Los Angeles Times' reporting; the Times story quoted a state bar spokeswoman who cited both the confidentiality of the bar's investigations as well as the passage of time in declining to answer many of the paper's questions.

But Erin Joyce, a solo practitioner who specializes in professional responsibility, was critical of the state bar's handling of the Girardi case. "They didn't take any action until there was a lot of press about it," she said.

Both Joyce and Ali said the disciplinary charges against Girardi are unlikely to have much practical effect, due to a provision in California's professional code that holds disciplinary proceedings in abeyance if a lawyer's license is inactive.

"It appears that they might have filed this to appease the public and to show the public that they're taking some action, even though that action - it almost seems like an empty threat, it doesn't really have any teeth," Ali said.