WASHINGTON D.C. — Though she’s sitting in a cool, crisp conference room, perched high above the sultry concrete jungle of downtown Washington D.C., University alum Laurie Miller is very much in the thick of things.

As chair of power law firm Nixon Peabody’s government investigations and white-collar defense practice, Miller is charged with defending some of the nation’s most powerful and influential figures. Her clients have included multiple Congressmen, presidents of Fortune 500 companies and officials in both Bush administrations and the Clinton administration. But Miller isn’t much of a namedropper.

“I can tell if I’ve done a good job if nobody ever knows that my client is under investigation,” she said in an interview in late August.

When she’s not writing briefs or defending her clients’ good name in the courtroom, Miller finds other ways to get involved in the Washington scene. As co-chair of the National Women’s Forum for President Barack Obama, she held one of the first fundraisers for the then-senator from Illinois.

And after becoming president, Obama didn’t forget Miller. She was there when he announced his nomination of Justice Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court.

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Though Miller has been in Washington for more than 30 years, she wasn’t always a power broker. In fact, her rise to the top began with a letter to another University alum that she penned when she was a junior majoring in political science and French at the University.

“My Congressman at the time was the House (of Representatives) Minority Leader named Gerald R. Ford,” she said, reclining in a board room chair and sipping a can of Diet Coke. “And I wrote a letter asking for an internship.”

A few months later, Miller moved to Washington for the summer.

“I got hooked on it,” she said. “Washington was everything I had been hearing about and studying about in Ann Arbor.”

When she got back to the University in the fall, Miller continued to pursue her degrees and soon thereafter found out that her former boss was going to become a much larger player in American politics.

Carolyn Burgess, Miller’s roommate at the Delta Delta Delta sorority house, remembers sitting around the television with other girls in the house on an October night in 1973, when Spiro Agnew resigned from his post as vice president.

As the history goes, Ford replaced Agnew.

“My recollection was that (Miller) had had (Ford) write her reference letters. We all said ‘Oh my gosh, she’s got the U.S. vice president writing her reference letters,” Burgess said. “Typical Laurie just being herself, she had these amazing people that thought well of her.”

But Burgess added that she wouldn’t have expected anything less of Miller, who spent many of her nights staying up late in the Undergraduate Library.

“I’ve got some really stupid pictures of us horsing around the sorority house and she’s not in some of them because she was a more serious student,” Burgess said. “But she was never holier than thou about it. She just did what she did.”

Burgess said she can often remember Miller coming in to the sorority house with stacks of books in her hands and her red hair flying everywhere, and though she was frazzled she always had time to talk through problems with her friends.

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Burgess added that Miller always takes the time to meet with her son, who lives in Washington, something that especially important to Burgess given that she lives in Australia.

“She just has a way with people,” Burgess said. “Most of our friends would tell you the same thing. No matter how busy she is, no matter how’s she’s risen in the Washington scene, she’s always made time for her personal friends.”

And her ease in communicating has helped her professionally as well.