Legal now requires that every retrieved fact be traceab...

This scenario requires balancing conflicting constraints. You should not standardize on a single encoder. Instead, keep decoupled-and-aligned encoding for documents where traceability is a hard requirement, and apply aggressive quantization to those embeddings to manage memory costs. For the rest of the corpus that lacks traceability requirements, use joint encoding to minimize the memory bill. This approach addresses the CFO’s cost concerns while ensuring legal compliance for the necessary documents.