Short answer: use staged retrieval with explicit collections, bounded queries, and source context that a reviewer can trace back to a document. For a legal contract review workspace, chunking and freshness are the release gates; model choice comes after those are observable.

Retrieval contract and bounded query

Write down what the reviewer must see before choosing an index. A hit is not useful if it cannot carry the tenant, access-control scope, document identifier, source URL, clause location, and the document version used for embedding. Preserve those fields on every indexed item.

I use two stages. First, a broad lexical or web-assisted pass finds candidate clauses and newly published guidance. Second, vector search narrows the candidates for semantic near-duplicate detection. The final prompt receives a bounded set of chunks plus their identifiers, not an unexamined dump of the index.…