B is correct because the architecture cannot be chosen intelligently until the team defines which quality attribute is more important to the actual business use case . The examination source explicitly selects B. Whole-document and chunked processing each perform better on different dimensions, so there is no universally superior option.

Anthropic's evaluation guidance emphasizes defining concrete success criteria first and validating candidate approaches against representative examples. The correct sequence is therefore to determine whether cross-section reasoning or citation precision is the more critical requirement, establish measurable acceptance thresholds, and evaluate both strategies on representative legal contracts.

Anthropic's legal summarization guidance also confirms that chunking or meta-summarization is useful for long documents, while acknowledging that processing an entire document can be appropriate when it fits within Claude's context window. For citations specifically, Anthropic provides native citation support that chunks document text into citation-addressable units and improves source-grounded citation behavior.

A and C each privilege one quality dimension before establishing business priority. D focuses on cost and latency even though the unresolved problem is quality tradeoff.

Relevant Claude Developer topics: Understanding Reqs, success criteria, requirement prioritization, long-context processing, chunking, citation accuracy, cross-document reasoning, representative evaluations, and architecture tradeoffs .