The world of the smartphone patent lawsuit is a minefield of legality and one minefield that Apple doesn’t want to walk into unprepared and is apparently gearing up for a long intense patent fight against Nokia this week by recruiting top legal minds.

According to an article over on Bloomberg, Apple takes on Nokia before the International Trade Commission over alleged patent infringements and us a “precursor “ to similar patent fights with HTC and Motorola, and iPhone guru Steve Jobs is recruiting lawyers for the upcoming battles.

Apparently Apple is the most sued tech company since the year 2008 according to LegalMetric Inc., and Jobs is hiring lawyers that have already done battle against some of the world’s biggest firms which include Intel, Broadcom, and Microsoft.

As you may be aware, Nokia fired the first salvo against Apple back in October of 2009 and filed the ITC complaint in December. Alston & Bird lawyer, Patrick Flynn who represents Nokia, opened the fight with stating, “Apple was a decade late to market for mobile phones. You can undercut competition when you use the inventions of others.”

So Apple is hiring more lawyers to enter the patent suit fray, which no doubt will roll on for years but ultimately end up with each tech company agreeing to license each others technology, but not until after shelling out enormous amounts of cash to their legal teams, so why not simply agree to license right from the outset?