In Bangalore, India -- tucked away inside a software development company -- five attorneys are poring over legal documents that might someday make or break a case in South Florida.

The lawyers work for iDiligence.net, a Miami Internet start-up that is hoping to make the case for outsourcing legal work.

Since launching the company late last year, Etan Mark and his partner Jason Jones, who works from Chicago, have been trying to convince local law firms to send their ‘‘low-level, high-volume'' legal grunt work to India.

While some of iDiligence's potential customers have resisted the idea, it's hard to resist the economics of it, said Mark.

"I tell them: ‘You can use a local lawyer who might bill $350 an hour, or an Indian attorney who graduated top of his class and that is fluent in English for $30 an hour,"' Mark said. "It's a pretty compelling pitch."

That's particularly true for smaller firms that might not have the staff to handle major document reviews, or firms working on a contingency basis that need to keep costs bare-bones, he said.

The flat fee of $30 an hour that iDiligence charges clients is enough to pay its Indian attorneys wages that are about 30 percent above the market average. And while the company has yet to turn a profit, Mark said revenue is on the rise.

India's cheap labor force has made it an outsourcing hub for the United States for more than two decades, yet legal outsourcing is a relatively new phenomenon.

According to Forrester Research, the industry essentially did not exist in India until 2005. Now, some 12,000 lawyers in that country work in legal outsourcing and that number is expected to hit 79,000 by 2015.

Working from his Miami Beach home, Mark says he was inspired by a bad job and a good book.

Early in his career, Mark, 28, said he found himself stuck at a major law firm in his native New York sorting and reviewing mountains of legal documents. It was work that, quite frankly, didn't require a law degree, he said.

"They were billing me out at $350 an hour as a first-year associate to basically sit there and read e-mails," he said. Soon afterwards, Mark stumbled across Thomas Friedman's book on globalization The World is Flat, which explores the rise of professional service outsourcing companies in Asia.

After making a few phone calls to Jones, a colleague from his days at George Washington School of Law, iDiligence was born.

Traveling to India, it took the pair about three months to recruit five lawyers, including a university lecturer and a woman who had been in private practice for 10 years.

One of the first questions Mark and his partner get from prospective clients is how do you manage lawyers in Bangalore from Miami Beach and Chicago?

For that, iDiligence uses a program called Basecamp made by 37 Signals that allows work groups to share and collaborate on documents.

But despite iDiligence's promise to save clients time and money, not everyone is receptive to the pitch, and Mark understands. "There is something to be said for having a person next door doing the work, instead of a person 10,000 miles away," he said.

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