Why? This would work pretty well in small claims, which costs not much at all.

Not sure about his location, but in New York small claims is limited to $5k.

It's stated elsethread that CA is $7,500. So that adds $2,500 to the cost, still well short of the claimed $50,000.

I don't understand.. there are 2 million lawyers in the U.S., so why is it so expensive?

For comparison, Europe in its entirety has less than 600.000 lawyers as of 2007, and while the U.S. no longer has more lawyers than the rest of the world combined, it is pretty close.

Interesting offtopic point: there is one lawyer per inmate in the U.S.