For most lawyers, filing an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court and publishing a novel within the span of six days — as Bingham McCutchen partner P. Sabin Willett recently did — would qualify as the biggest week of their career.

But for Willett, that honor goes to a week in October 2008, when the elation following a federal judge’s order that the firm’s pro bono clients at Guantanamo Bay be released was crushed just three days later when an appellate court stayed the order.

At least the duo of events this time around were both positive.

“It did make it a busy week, I’ll say that,” Willett says. “It was quite exciting.”

Willett led a group of Bingham attorneys in drafting an amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court on Feb. 27 in United States v. Windsor, one of two gay marriage cases before the court. The federal Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman, is unconstitutional, the brief argues on behalf of nearly 300 employers who say DOMA is burdensome from a human resources and morale-building perspective.

“This brief really was a fairly complicated issue just because we had so many clients [and] the clients were extremely active in the drafting of this brief,” Willett says.

When other employers heard the brief was being drafted, they asked to be added all the way up to the day before it was filed, he says.

“Usually an amicus brief in the Supreme Court is a fairly technical thing,” Willett says, “but lots of folks were interested in this one.”

Six days after the filing, Simon & Schuster launched Willett’s fourth novel, “Abide with Me,” a love story about a soldier who returns home to Vermont from Afghanistan still obsessed with his adolescent romance. The story has been described as a modern retelling of Emily Brontë’s classic “Wuthering Heights.”

“It is in a way, but not in a way that is entirely faithful to ‘Wuthering Heights,’” Willett says. “Certainly I wanted to take some of its mood, and the novel

is full of all sorts of homages to Brontë and ‘Wuthering Heights.’”

Willett’s first two novels were legal and political thrillers, and the third, “Present Value” was a comedic social commentary. There was a 10-year gap between “Present Value” and “Abide with Me,” which Willett says was partly due to Bingham’s work representing a group of Uighur Muslim prisoners held at Guantanamo.

“From 2005 through 2009, the case just swallowed every ounce of spare oxygen that there was between my regular cases and just living life,” Willett says. “I wanted to do a love story, and I also wanted to do a story that featured a soldier since I had spent so much time with them during this Gitmo stuff.”

Willett was happy to return to fiction writing, which he says is a pursuit not wholly unrelated to his day job as a commercial litigator because he always strives to tell his clients stories in a human and accessible way in bankruptcy proceedings

“You’re more likely to win if you can tell a story well,” he says. “I think complementary is a good way to describe it.”