Comment by avidiax

LLMs are necessarily linear. If you paste the contract first, the attention mechanism of the model can still process the contract, but only generically. It pays attention to the key points of the contract. If you ask the question first, the attention part of the model is already primed. It will now read the contract paying more attention to the parts that are relevant to the question.

If I ask you to read Moby Dick and then ask you to critique the author's use of weather as a setting, that's a bit more difficult than if I ask you to to critique that aspect before asking you to read the book.