We would like to use the standard Contract (Legal) object to manage contracts but the current design in Salesforce, but it does not let us set that contract as private and have the account as public read/write at the same time.  Some contracts are commercially sensitive and need to be set to private, however all Salesforce users should be able to view & share the account information internally.   We use contract objects to generate contract documents in (custom code) and approval processes, so our preferred option is to use the standard objects.  One option we are considering is to create a custom object but I would like to know if there is disadvantage of using a custom object compare to the standard Contract - and also if there is a simple setup that can separate Contract & Account organization wide default settings.  Any help is greatly appreciated, thanks