Perhaps the sides in the ever-escalating war over the Skype deal will work out their differences and settle–which is what should and probably will eventually happen after everyone realizes how stupid all this noisy legal wrangling over the Internet telephony giant is.

But that day is decidedly not today, given a pair of recent PR hires by parties involved.

The founders of Skype, via the two tech companies they control, Joost and Joltid, have hired Sitrick & Company, headquartered in Los Angeles, while Index Ventures has tapped Joele Frank, Wilkinson Brimmer Katcher, based in New York.

Both strategic communications and public relations firms are well known for employing some very sharp elbows and extremely tough talk when it is time for some creative corporate crisis management.

And both are familiar with tech issues, having worked on contentious issues related to companies such as Microsoft (MSFT), Yahoo (YHOO), CBS (CBS) online unit CNET, and others.

And there is plenty of bad blood to work with here.

Yesterday, in yet another legal volley, Joost and Joltid filed a motion for preliminary injunction against former Joost CEO Michelangelo Volpi and Index Ventures, where Volpi now works as a partner.

They are asking that he not use knowledge or confidential information he got at the video start-up in current dealings with Skype.

Legal attacks have become the negotiating tool of choice from the founders of Skype, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, who were on the losing side of the $2 billion deal to buy the Internet telephony giant from eBay (EBAY).

Volpi is now a partner at London-based Index, which was one of the smaller players on the winning side of the bid, putting up $75 million.

To complicate things further, the innovative and entrepreneurial pair also own a company called Joltid, which has licensed key technology for Skype to eBay.

Joltid and eBay have already been fighting in court over that agreement, bickering back and forth about whether eBay violated the terms of that deal or not.

Via Joltid, Zennström and Friis also filed suit again against Skype and its owner, eBay, for copyright violations in the U.S.

For good measure, they added the winning buyout group, including Index, Silver Lake Partners, Andreessen Horowitz and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.

And both Joltid and Joost have also sued Volpi personally, as well as Index, making serious allegations about his behavior as Joost CEO.

This kind of mud-slinging could get even worse with the hiring of big PR firms.

Along with Frank and Sitrick, by the way, Silver Lake–which is the big player on the winning side–has hired Edelman’s crisis and issues management team.

Interestingly, several sources said, the various players have also been engaged in settlement talks, even as the lawsuits have piled up.

Coming to some agreement is clearly the best outcome, although it does not appear that the spate of lawsuits has yet derailed the eBay deal with the Silver Lake-led group, which could even close in the next several weeks.

“Everyone should be thinking ahead of the headlights,” said one source. “But right now, it seems to be all about emotions.”

New Yahoo Marketing head Elisa Steele named a colleague from her former job, NetApp (NTAP), as SVP of Global Communications at the Internet giant.

Eric Brown (pictured here) was the VP of corporate relations at the data storage company, on whose board Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has also served. Before that, he was at Adaptec (ADPT).

Brown will report to Steele and start at the company in July.

Brown is filling a slot left when former Yahoo PR head Jill Nash left at Yahoo in February. She was briefly replaced by her deputy Brad Williams, who was laid off from Yahoo in a recent round of cuts.

He is also yet another executive from the business software arena to be hired under Bartz, who also comes from that background. Bartz also hired Jeff Russakow from Symantec (SYMC), which makes antivirus software and other security for the post of Customer Advocacy SVP.

It’ll be interesting to see how they all operate in a consumer-facing company like Yahoo, with all its many dramatic ups and downs of late, and which BoomTown has often compared to a Mexican telenovela.

Here’s Steele’s memo to the Yahoo (YHOO) staff, which includes a self-described “bad habit of eating ice cream in bed while reading my Kindle and surfing the web.”

(BoomTown can’t make this stuff up!)

Here’s the internal memo:

Marketing & Executive Teams,

I’m very pleased to announce that Eric Brown will be joining Yahoo! as Senior Vice President, Global Communications, reporting directly to me. In this critical role, Eric will oversee our Global Communications function, including public relations, product promotion, executive communications, public affairs, internal communications, corporate reputation management and social media outreach.

Eric is joining Yahoo! at a particularly pivotal time, as we update our corporate position and message, develop and execute a renewed global brand strategy and launch major new products and solutions. Eric will be tasked with more closely integrating the global communications team with broader marketing initiatives and the company’s overall business strategy. A critical objective will be to set the communications agenda and drive Yahoo!’s message to our various constituencies–the media, analysts, consumers, employees, and key industry influencers who create buzz and can have a significant impact on how our brand is perceived.

Eric is a Silicon Valley communications veteran with 18 years of tech experience. Most recently, Eric and I collaborated at NetApp, where he spent the last nine years helping to transform the company into a multibillion dollar global enterprise. As Vice President of Corporate Relations, Eric managed a large global team and strategic communications program. He was the core communications executive responsible for the company’s recent revamp of brand strategy and execution. He also played a significant communications role in helping the company gain recognition by Fortune magazine as the “Best Company to Work for in America” in 2009. Prior to NetApp, Eric was the head of PR for Adaptec responsible for B2B, brand and consumer communications, and held additional leadership positions in both corporate and agency environments.

On a personal note, Eric’s partner’s name is Scot, he has a Pomeranian named Clio, a passion for cooking and travel, and a self-described “bad habit of eating ice cream in bed while reading my Kindle and surfing the web.”

Eric will join us in early July, so please join me in giving him a warm welcome. I look forward to his leadership contributions in this vitally important role at Yahoo!.

Jill Nash, Yahoo’s chief communications officer, has told CEO Carol Bartz and other Yahoo staff this afternoon that she is leaving the company.

Yahoo has not made Nash’s resignation official, but is likely to do so quickly as Bartz tries to stanch incessant leaks (like this one; see below!).

In any case, sources said Nash does not appear to have any definite plans to move to another company immediately, so the reasons for her departure are unclear.

BoomTown would have to guess that Nash is simply completely spent from her past two years at Yahoo (YHOO), which have been very fraught from a public relations perspective, to say the least.

Nash, who was hired by former CEO Terry Semel, has had to deal with everything from management turmoil, after Semel was replaced by co-founder Jerry Yang, to poor financial results to a nasty takeover attempt by Microsoft (MSFT) to an even less friendly proxy fight to a failed search deal with Google (GOOG) to recent wrenching layoffs.

Not much good news to report, in other words, especially with a tough turnaround road ahead with newly installed CEO Bartz, who seems to have a very strong mind of her own about public relations.

(Including, several sources tell me, this week in an internal memo, offering cash rewards to employees who turn in other employees who leak to the press. Bartz has also initiated investigations to stop leaks. All I can say about these tactics–while it might seem reasonable to try to stop the leaking, from a management perspective, and I see why Bartz is focusing on it–is: Yahoo is not a prison and its employees are not snitches and–more to the point–they won’t leak to me if Bartz fixes the company.)

While I have not always seen eye-to-eye with Nash on this column’s coverage of Yahoo, I have found her to be a pro to deal with and fair, especially considering the often tense circumstances at Yahoo in the last year.

Nash is not the first top Yahoo exec to depart since Bartz got to Yahoo in mid-January and will not likely be the last, as the new CEO carves out her own path and chooses the team she wants.

Many Yahoos have told me, not for attribution and at all levels of the company, that they are bone-tired of the long-term struggle the company has been engaged in and want to move on, even in this weak economic climate.

Last week, this column reported the departures of Zimbra co-founder Satish Dharmaraj and marketing exec Eric Hadley, neither of which was necessarily due to Bartz’s arrival.

Now it’s Nash’s turn to say goodbye. According to Yahoo’s Web site, her duties were to lead its outward-facing efforts.

It reads, in part: “As a key member of the Yahoo! executive team, Nash will be responsible for the company’s worldwide communications efforts, including public and media relations, corporate reputation, corporate, financial and employee communications, and crisis and issues management.”

Nash came to Yahoo from the Gap, where she was the VP of global corporate communications. Previous to that, she worked at Charles Schwab (SCHW), KPMG and Transamerica Life.

Last night, BoomTown was at the Horn Group offices in San Francisco to appear on a panel called “Is Social Media Killing PR?”

Focused on the “future of the media ecosystem,” it was moderated by Media Survey’s Sam Whitmore. Besides me, the other panelists were the Horn Group’s Susan Etlinger and Jeremiah Owyang, a Web strategist with Forrester Research.

The panel topic was inspired by recent blog rants by Jason Calacanis, Robert Scoble and Michael Arrington, all of whom have taken potshots at the PR industry as unnecessary or broken in the new social media order.

Of course, as was the intent, their pieces caused a teapot-tempest in the sector, although I said at the start of the panel that I was not so sure that PR folks should bite at this particular bait from a trio of bloggers well known for liking to start controversial debates.

In any case, it was a good discussion to a packed audience about what the implications of social media are for the PR business–essentially, fewer press releases and more Twitters!

My take was that as much as things have changed, little actually has and that social media were not going to turn a weak pitch into a strong one.

All that counted a decade ago were good products and solid start-ups–and that is all that still counts today.

And, in fact, with all the social tools PR folks now have, it is easier than ever for them and companies to go right around the gatekeepers of the media directly to customers.

Here’s a short video I did at the event: