WASHINGTON (AP) — Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers looked close to home, or the office, in choosing the free legal cases to take on as a private lawyer. No sweeping constitutional matters for her, or even terribly contentious ones.

She helped a garage attendant for her building complete an adoption. She won a case for a Nigerian woman who was fighting a deportation order. She lost when representing an indigent single mother denied disability benefits.

"She handled small matters," said lawyer Jerry Clements, who has worked with Miers. "Somebody needed a divorce, somebody needed an adoption."

As head of the State Bar of Texas, she urged lawyers to take on more pro bono, or unpaid, cases for the poor, but she resisted proposals to make such work mandatory. "The real issue is how to provide more services of better quality to the poor who need them," she said.

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Her Dallas law firm, Locke Liddell & Sapp LLP, didn't keep track of how many free cases she accepted or how many hours she devoted to them, and associates are not aware of her doing so on a frequent basis.

In any event, her pro bono cases were strikingly more private or limited in legal precedent than those taken on by Chief Justice John Roberts when he worked as a lawyer at the Washington law firm of Hogan & Hartson for some 13 years.

In her pro bono work, as in other aspects of her career, Miers left a light mark on matters of great controversy.

Roberts provided assistance on a death row appeal, helped lawyers on Supreme Court arguments to overturn a Colorado referendum that would have allowed discrimination against gays, and advised Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in the 2000 presidential election dispute.

Miers once pitched in with Catholic Charities of Dallas to save a woman from being sent back to her native Nigeria.

That woman "was alone in life with her little baby, just a kind of a victim in a terrible relationship," said Vanna Slaughter, who handles immigration matters for Catholic Charities. The woman's advocates had to demonstrate that she would face extreme hardship if deported, and the charity did not think it could help her win.

Slaughter said Miers met the woman separately, called the charity offering her help, and must have spent more than 100 hours on the case. "It was a pretty daunting situation and she prevailed in it," Slaughter said. "We're forever grateful to her."

Clements said Miers also helped a man who parked cars in their firm's garage. "One of them desperately needed help with an adoption issue," he said.

In 1981 case of Ware v. Schweiker, she represented Carolina Ware, a single mother caring for six dependent children who had sought Social Security disability benefits, arguing that various medical problems had prevented her from working.

Ware, who waived the right to a lawyer in her initial appeal, had her claim denied. She sought another hearing and Miers was her lawyer.

"Now ably represented by volunteer private counsel, obtained through a community legal aid service, an applicant for Social Security Disability Benefits and for Social Security Supplemental Income seeks reversal of the secretary's decision, made after a hearing at which she was not represented, denying her those benefits," the judge wrote.

Ware and Miers lost as the court agreed that the denial of benefits was appropriate. The court said Ware had offered no medical evidence except for her own testimony.