The Harvard Law School faculty last week endorsed a series of changes to an introductory course for first-year students.

Without a single dissenting vote, the faculty moved Thursday to back a report by the First-Year Lawyering (FYL) Committee, chaired this semester by Fairchild Professor of Law Andrew L. Kaufman ’51, which advised that the FYL course narrow its focus to legal research, writing and oral presentation.

The committee also recommended that the school double the number of FYL lecturers from seven to 14, reducing lecturers’ section sizes from 80 students to 40.

In an interview yesterday, Kaufman said the reforms would go into effect “as soon as practicable.”

The school established the FYL program three years ago after receiving complaints from law firms “that our students were not quite so well prepared as students from other institutions,” Kaufman said.

“Students who go to summer jobs after their first year have to know how to write a memorandum and have to know how to do research,” Kaufman said.

“By and large, our students come to law school without knowing how to do legal research, which is not like history research or economics research,” said Kaufman, who was once a history concentrator in Lowell House.

Legal research “isn’t intuitive and it isn’t easy,” he said. But he said “regular faculty members don’t want to teach research and writing,” prompting the school to hire an additional corps of lecturers to help first-years develop these skills.

In filling the new FYL lecturer spots, the school will look for candidates “with ambition to move on in academic life,” Kaufman said. He said the school will expect FYL lecturers to be scholars as well as teachers, and will look to foster closer coordination between FYL lecturers and professors who lead other first-year courses.

“When the school hired initially, there was a greater emphasis on practical experience and there was an expectation that people would stay longer,” Kaufman said. The committee, he said, proposed “a different model,” in which academics will hold lecturer posts for approximately two years. “We’re afraid of burnout,” he said.

Kaufman also said that the increased number of lecturers would likely lead to fewer student teaching assistants in FYL courses.

‘DEVIL IN THE DETAILS’

In its most controversial section, the report suggests that the school rescind a rule that had required FYL teaching assistants to be members of the Board of Student Advisers (BSA), a campus organization.

Under a long-standing reciprocal agreement among the BSA, the Harvard Law Review and the Legal Aid Bureau, students can only join one of the three extracurricular groups.

But the report, which was released earlier this month, recommended that Law Review and Legal Aid Bureau members be permitted to apply for FYL teaching assistant positions.