He obviously should have just applied some aikido somewhere.

Yes, it’s true, bad – i mean, action – film fans. Perhaps the only takeshigemichi (not to mention the only tulku) who is also a household name in America, Steven Seagal, will soon be back in court.

And this time, it’s personal – i mean, this time, he’s the plaintiff.

Seagal has filed a lawsuit in California Superior Court against legal firm Loeb & Loeb, suing for $450,000 in damages for overcharging him in an extortion trial that began in 2002. (Or, as the only celebrity gossip website worth reading, TMZ, put it, he “got Opri’d.”

In February 2004, said extortion trial closed out with Seagal’s former business partner Julius R. Nasso sentenced to 366 days in prison for paying a mobster to threaten Seagal. Reported the New York Times at that time: “Mr. Nasso, who was once a close friend of Mr. Seagal’s and who produced his movies, was sentenced in Federal District Court after pleading guilty last summer to extortion conspiracy, admitting that he had conspired to threaten Mr. Seagal to collect a debt.”

Now, Seagal has turned on his original legal team. In Seagal and Steamroller Productions Inc. v. Loeb and Loeb, the action guy has “determined that he had been substantially overcharged and that he had already paid for substantially more than what was reasonable for the legal representation that he had authorized.”

As for the money, Loeb & Loeb’s books claims Seagal in still in arrears to the firm to the tune of $575,403.78 of some $1,084,202 charged.

As for the representation, Seagal paid half a million (beer money for the dude, no doubt) before he had “grown skeptical of [the defendant’s] experience, its representation and its billing practices” in July 2003.

No court date has been set.