I tend to be skeptical of many resource-saving ideas, which often have pretty substantial hidden costs and fewer benefits than at first appear. But this one strikes me as largely win-win: Having an option in Westlaw in which the document routing page — the one that lists the name of the user, the query that produced the document, the client id, and so on — appears at the top of the first page of the document, rather than as a separate page.
The first page would still prominently (and in the same place) display the user name, so that documents printed on share printer can be properly routed. Most of the time, this will save one page per document, which could be a large fraction of the pages used each day (since many Westlaw printouts are only a few pages long). And it will generally make it slightly easier for users to quickly see which of their several printed documents is which.
I thought Westlaw might already have such an option, but when I e-mailed the West Reference Attorneys, I was told that no such option exists. The only way of getting rid of the separate cover page is to download or e-mail the document to myself first, but that takes extra time and effort that I suspect most users would prefer to avoid. So just on the off chance that some of our readers will know how to pass along the suggestion to someone who can do something about it — or that some readers know of a feature that the West reference attorney didn’t know about — I thought I’d mention it here.