LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — They called him Tiny, naturally, because he was anything but. A bouncer at a pawnshop here, the man significantly outweighed most of the store’s customers and would-be robbers. Now, he stood accused of roughing up his girlfriend.

As a judge waited to hear the case, a young lawyer named Hillary Rodham — who was always careful to address Tiny by his real name — got his accuser to sit down with her for a heart-to-heart.

In short order, the girlfriend dropped the charges, saying it had all been just a lover’s quarrel.

To hear Hillary Clinton tell it as a candidate now, the time between her postgraduate work with the Children’s Defense Fund in 1974 and her two terms as first lady in Washington was a blur of child-rearing, campaigning for her husband and working as an advocate on issues like children’s health and education. During Bill Clinton’s first presidential run in 1992, her years as a corporate litigator at the Rose Law Firm were exhaustively examined for possible conflicts of interest involving clients like Tyson Foods, Walmart and Madison Guaranty, a savings-and-loan that became a central focus of the Whitewater investigation.

But little attention has been paid to Mrs. Clinton’s work in the courtroom.

It was not glamorous: She represented a moving company whose customer had sued it for damaging a coffee table, a crop-duster who flew his airplane too close to his rice fields and injured a farmworker, and a canning company that was sued after a man opened his pork and beans and found the rear end of a rat.