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Re:My Doctor's Office Asked Me To Lie by Xylakant on Friday May 11, 2012 @10:29AM (#3959334)
In germany for certain contracts (such as buying a house or creating a LLC) it's required that a notary reads them aloud for you. That's quite a bit of fun if the contract contains annotations that make it fill a binder. There are some loopholes though: The contract may refer to another document that the notary may read to his assistant, so not everybody has to go through the whole ordeal.
Re:My Doctor's Office Asked Me To Lie by speleding on Friday May 11, 2012 @10:41AM (#3959406)
Yeah we have that too in the Netherlands, at least for the important portions of the documents. The last time I closed on a house it took over two hours.

All relevant documents had been e-mailed to us beforehand but you still cannot ask them to skip the reading. Being too careful can be annoying too.

Re:My Doctor's Office Asked Me To Lie by dalke on Friday May 11, 2012 @02:17PM (#3960526)
Idle curiosity makes me wonder if this applies when the purchaser is deaf. I'm going to predict the answer is "yes."
Re:My Doctor's Office Asked Me To Lie by lobo_tuerto on Friday May 11, 2012 @12:19PM (#3959956)
I'd take annoying over being effed up anytime. You can't ever be too cautious in legal matters.
Re:My Doctor's Office Asked Me To Lie by SoftwareMaven on Friday May 11, 2012 @11:05AM (#3959542)
Seems like that could leave a nice side effect of shortening contracts.
Re:My Doctor's Office Asked Me To Lie by slowpoke on Friday May 11, 2012 @12:53PM (#3960124)
In Germany, the stronghold of bureaucracy? You wish.
Re:My Doctor's Office Asked Me To Lie by Spoom on Friday May 11, 2012 @01:08PM (#3960201)
I recently closed on a house in Ohio. At closing, the notary verbally summarized every contract we signed. I'm not sure if it was legally required (I believe he stated it was) but I also took the time to read them. Most of them were copies of contracts I had already signed with the realtor / mortgage company at offer / mortgage application, so nothing was particularly surprising.

Further, at offer time, the realtor read aloud every contract and answered questions we had about them. I don't feel that they tried to pull the wool over my eyes at any point. Perhaps it's different with other realtors?