I maintain an internal weekly newsletter* sort of thing with zero or more points of interest* for each of a couple dozen people*. It's organized in groups within columns with a header for each such person-group, and my initial design when I took over and reworked it originally was to have the header right-aligned (displacing the text flow around it if necessary):
On the suggestion of my boss*, and although I wasn't really convinced it was necessary, I changed it a while back to a more conventional format with a slightly-indented left-aligned header on its own line:
I'm not really asking for bullet points to use to argue for one side or another. What I am asking is whether I'm even right in the first place to think that the first style is at least as legible as the second, while being more compact and maybe tying the name closer to the info for that name. (If there are other obvious glitches in the design as shown, I'd like to know about those too, but I suspect the whole thing would have to be shown to really catch much else.)
Since the whole thing has to fit on a single double-sided sheet of 8½"x11", compactness is a feature. But it's not the only one. And since everyone who reads this knows most if not all of the people mentioned, it doesn't need to be so much good at drawing in readers as acting as a readable quick-ref. (The lower margin in each group is for taking additional notes, and sees a good bit of use. It's not really going to be removed, although the height is occasionally tweaked to fit better.)
Full page with liberal lorem ipsum substitutions everywhere — all other formatting, and approximate bullet point distribution (including the occasional empty group), as original:
*None of this is quite accurate but it's close enough. In particular, this is volunteer work.