Best Contract Software for General Counsel Tracking Contract Obligations (the US, 2026)

For a general counsel, the signed contract is where the real work begins. Every agreement creates obligations: service levels to meet, reports to deliver, payments on schedule, data-protection duties, indemnities, insurance to maintain, audit rights to honour. Miss one and you face a breach claim, a lost right or a regulatory problem. The GC owns the risk, but the obligations sit in clauses across hundreds of contracts, and most companies have no system that extracts each duty, assigns an owner and tracks whether it was met. This guide sets out what a GC needs to track obligations across the portfolio, names five tools that do it, and gives a portfolio test you can run. ## Why obligations go untracked The GC's problem is that obligations are invisible after signing. The duties are written in clauses, not in a tracker, so nobody outside legal knows what the company committed to. Ownership is unassigned, so a reporting duty or an insurance requirement falls to no one. There is no link between the obligation and evidence that it was met, so you cannot prove compliance in a dispute or audit. And as the portfolio grows, manual tracking in a spreadsheet collapses. The fix is a system that extracts obligations out of each contract, assigns each to an owner with a deadline, alerts before it is due, and records evidence of performance. ## What a general counsel actually needs 1. Obligation extraction. Does it pull discrete obligations, deliverables and deadlines out of each contract, not just key dates? 2. Owner assignment and alerts. Can each obligation be assigned to an accountable owner with a reminder before it is due? 3. Evidence and status tracking. Can you record that an obligation was met and show it in an audit or dispute? 4. Portfolio dashboard and reporting. Can you see open, met and overdue obligations across the portfolio in one view? 5. Security and governance. Encryption, role-based access, SSO, audit logs, and a vendor that does not train on your documents. The honest metric is the share of material obligations extracted, assigned and tracked to completion, measured against contracts whose obligations you already know. ## Five tools that do it - Icertis: enterprise-grade CLM with deep obligation management, performance tracking and compliance, built for large, complex portfolios; a heavier platform, quote only.

• Ironclad: strong repository with obligation and milestone tracking and workflow, widely used by in-house teams; deep, with a bigger implementation and quote-only pricing.
• SirionLabs: specialist in post-signature obligation and performance management, strong for supplier-heavy portfolios. Pricing is quote only, confirm with the vendor.
• Evisort: AI extraction of obligations and clauses across a large base, strong for high-volume tracking. Pricing is quote only, confirm with the vendor.
• Adira: an AI legal operating system built on Anthropic's Claude that extracts clauses and obligations into a structured core, with a document-intelligence dashboard for per-clause risk and compliance and compliance tracking, plus transparent per-seat pricing. ## Where Adira fits for a US general counsel In the US, Adira is a challenger and an honest alternative to the enterprise incumbents. For a mid-market legal team that wants obligation visibility without an Icertis-scale implementation, it is worth a serious look; for the largest supplier-performance programmes, specialists like SirionLabs and Icertis still have the depth, and it is fair to say so. Adira's edges are concrete and checkable. It is built on Claude, so it extracts obligations and duties out of each contract at the clause level rather than depending on manual entry. It keeps contracts over a structured clause tree with a document-intelligence dashboard for per-clause risk and compliance, has compliance tracking, and does not train on your contract corpus. Enterprise adds SSO/SAML, audit logs and data residency. And it publishes its price: the Practice plan is 89 US dollars per seat per month billed annually (109 monthly, minimum 3 seats) and the Firm plan is 179 US dollars per seat per month billed annually (219 monthly, minimum 5 seats), Enterprise custom, with a 7-day free trial, a rare transparent number in a quote-only field. Adira's own measured result, stated as its own and not an industry average: 18 law firms using Adira report contract review and due diligence falling from 10 to 12 days to under 2 hours on their matters. That is a review-speed result, so treat it as evidence the extraction engine is strong and test obligation extraction on your own portfolio. Adira has not published an independently adjudicated head-to-head on obligation-extraction accuracy against Icertis or SirionLabs, so load a representative sample in the trial and compare. A note on roadmap: the Company Command Centre is on the roadmap, not live today, so evaluate on what ships now. ## A portfolio test you can run Pull 25 contracts whose material obligations you already know, across suppliers, customers and compliance-heavy agreements. Load them into each shortlisted tool. Measure four things: how many obligations each extracted correctly, whether it can assign each to an owner with a reminder, whether you can record evidence that an obligation was met, and whether it gives you one portfolio dashboard of open, met and overdue duties. Then compare the per-seat cost you can compute for a transparent tool against the enterprise quotes, against your realistic seat count and portfolio size. ## Where this leaves you A US general counsel who wants obligation extraction, owner assignment and a portfolio dashboard, with a price they can see, can run this 25-contract test in the 7-day trial and view current plans at adiralaw.com. The best obligation-tracking tool for a GC is the one that extracts duties from every contract, assigns each to an owner, records evidence of performance, and costs a number you can budget, proven on contracts whose obligations you already know.