Legal pad paper
The legal pad layout on 8.5 × 14 inch paper: standard ruling with a vertical margin down the left, where a second reader can write.
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What makes a legal pad legal
Two things, and neither of them is the colour. The size is 8.5 × 14 inches, and the ruling carries a vertical line about 1¼ inches from the left edge — the "down line" — which is the feature that historically defined the format. The yellow is a printing-trade habit that stuck; a white pad with the same margin is every bit as legal.
The margin was always for annotation
The wide left margin exists so a second reader can comment beside the text without writing over it. That remains the most useful thing about the layout, and it is why the format survives in professions that mark up drafts rather than simply reading them. If you are printing these to work on, set the margin generously rather than accepting a narrow one — a cramped margin gets used for nothing.
Fourteen inches is the point
The extra three inches over Letter is roughly eight more lines at this ruling. Across a long meeting that means fewer page turns, and fewer places where a note gets separated from the context that made it meaningful. The cost is filing: most scanners, binders and folders assume Letter, and the bottom three inches of a legal sheet are where documents get quietly cropped.
Printing it accurately
This only measures correctly if your printer doesn't rescale the page. In the print dialog set Scale: 100% — not "Fit to page" or "Shrink oversized pages". If you're not sure it worked, print the calibration page, measure the ruler on it with a real ruler, and it will tell you exactly what your printer is doing to the page.