A favourite joke in legal circles in recent years has noted the career path that has seen several solicitors, and especially those who have spent time working at the Law Society, become o mbudsmen of various kinds.Among others, there is former Law Society President Tony Holland (personal investment), Julian Farrand (pensions), former Law Society Council member David Thomas (banking), Brian Murphy (building societies), Peter Dean (investment) and Roger Jefferies (independent housing).And then there is the Insurance Ombudsman, Walter Merricks, who recently beat off competition from several of his fellow solicitor ombudsmen to bag the most prestigious watchdog's job of them all -- the Financial Services Ombudsman (FSO).

He says he is 'honoured' to have been picked for the job but admits it is an 'intimidating' prospect.Until the end of this month, Mr Merricks will continue as investment ombudsman, a position he has held since 1996.

He will then move across to start work on the mammoth task of bringing together the five existing ombudsman schemes in banking, building societies, personal investment, pensions and his own investment ombudsman scheme, as well as three arbitration service schemes (see right).

The single scheme will stand as the watchdog for the financial services industry once its regulatory body, the Financial Services Authority (FSA), is established by the Financial Services and Markets Bill currently going through Parliament.It is thought that the new super-ombudsman scheme will have to deal with around 150,000 telephone enquiries each year and 30,000 written complaints.

Mr Merricks's present scheme -- the second largest after that overseeing personal investments -- receives about 20,000 initial enquiries each year, which result in around 5,000 actual investigations.

He says by adding up the existing budgets and staff for the various schemes, on 'minimum figures' he expects to have a budget of about £15 million and a staff of 300.Mr Merricks qualified as a solicitor in 1970.

After a scholarship in Montreal, he joined Camden Law Centre as its director from 1972 to 1976.

He then moved to lecture at Brunel University but after five years left to take up a position with the New Law Journal.

In 1985, he joined the Law Society.

When he left to become investment ombudsman, he was the Society's director of professional and legal policy.Mr Merricks says his legal training is 'vital' to the 'semi-judicial job' of the ombudsman, a requirement borne out by the preponderance of solicitor ombudsmen.

Legal training can help a solicitor to deal with the analysis of complaints and dispute resolution, he says; it also helps cope with management issues once a solicitor has run a firm.Mr Merricks says he learnt important lessons from his time at the Law Society, which was in a 'terrible mess' when he joined.

'The Law Society Council was incredibly defensive.

I tried to open things up and build bridges with external people.' He says his aim was to build good relations with the government and consumer organisations to promote the interests of solicitors in a co-operative and 'low key' manner.

The approach was not always easy, he recalls, as the profession sometimes wanted to hear the Law Society 'screaming', an approach which achieves nothing and brings the government down 'rather firmly on you'.

He says his experiences at Chancery Lane gave him an understanding of how to represent and balance the interests of an industry and consumers.He adds that he is aware of the lessons to be learnt from the problems facing the Office for the Supervision of Solicitors (OSS) and the damage which can be done to a profession where confidence in regulation is undermined.The biggest problem facing Mr Merricks, he admits, is the integration of the existing schemes into a single unified arrangement.

'The integration is the biggest challenge and it is a critical exercise to get right.

It could easily go wrong,' he says.

The main goal is to achieve the single scheme without amassing an unmanageable backlog of complaints.

'There would be nothing worse than opening the new FSO scheme with cases not even getting into the system for 12 months, the situation sadly the OSS has got itself into,' he adds.Perhaps as a note for solicitors, Mr Merricks says good complaints handling and regulation are necessary to sustain consumer confidence and businesses profitability in the market place.

Echoing Legal Services Ombudsman Ann Abraham, who recently warned that self-regulation was a barrier to public confidence, Mr Merricks says his industry realises the importance of distance between the roles of regulator and enforcer.

He says: 'We don't want to be judge and jury in our own cases.

We recognise that if we do people won't have confidence in our judgements'.THE MERGED SCHEMEThe Financial Services and Markets Bill will create the new Financial Services Authority (FSA) and the Financial Services Ombudsman scheme (FSO) when it becomes law.The Bill received its second reading in the House of Commons at the end of June.Because of insufficient time, the Bill will not complete its passage through both houses in one parliamentary session as normally required.

The government therefore requires opposition approval to take the unprecedented step of carrying the Bill forward into the next parliamentary year.

If this happens the government anticipates the Bill will be enacted in April 2000.The FSA will be the sole regulator of financial service providers and for the first time will regulate everything from banks, stockbrokers and independent financial advisors to fund managers and Lloyds of London.The office of the FSO will be a one-stop shop for dissatisfied financial services consumers once they have been through usual regulatory channels.

The FSO will bring together the existing ombudsmen schemes in banking, investment, pensions, building societies, insurance, personal investment.

It will be the largest ombuds-man scheme in the world.At present there are 270 firms of solicitors in England and Wales authorised to conduct investment business which will be regulated by the FSA when it comes into being.