After a hiatus since September, hostile activity has returned to Silicon Valley with Broadcom Corp.'s $764 million bid for storage equipment maker Emulex Corp. Seven of the 10 largest bids for tech companies last year were unsolicited, but six of those bidders walked away, most notably Microsoft Corp., which abandoned its $48 billion offer for Yahoo! Inc. in May 2008. Oracle Corp. was the only pursuer to bag its prey when it bought BEA Systems Inc.

Broadcom tapped Kenton King, Leif King and David Hansen of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP in Palo Alto, Calif., for legal advice. Company general counsel Arthur Chong was previously the general counsel at Safeco Corp., which Kenton King -- no relation to Leif -- represented last year on its $6.2 billion sale to Liberty Mutual Group while he was advising Yahoo! on Microsoft's approach. The offer by Irvine, Calif.-based Broadcom is its first hostile bid and its first for a public target; its 40-plus acquisitions have involved private, usually small, technology companies.

On the banking side, Stefan Selig, Todd Dow and David King of Bank of America Merrill Lynch are advising Broadcom.

Emulex tapped Pawan Tewari of Goldman, Sachs & Co. and Jonathan Layne, Dennis Friedman and Michelle Hodges of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP. The Costa Mesa, Calif., target also has a history with Skadden, whose Celeste Greene and Gregory Smith represented it on its $316 million purchase of Vixel Corp. in 2003.