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.
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.
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?
