The top staff of the state’s attorney general is by now used to hearing their boss, Andrew Cuomo, repeat the office’s mantra: solving the real problems of real people in real time.

“I know it by heart because he’s constantly saying it to me on a daily basis,” Mr. Cuomo’s special assistant and deputy counselor, Benjamin Lawsky, said.

Mr. Lawsky and the other attorneys in Mr. Cuomo’s inner circle of advisers generally have a couple of traits in common: They had never worked for Mr. Cuomo before, and most of them spent a good portion of their careers as federal prosecutors in New York City, where several members of the group became professionally acquainted with each other.

In that sense, Mr. Cuomo is the new man on the team he has assembled.

Occupying four out of the five offices nearest to Mr. Cuomo’s are veterans of the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan. They include the deputy attorney general for criminal justice, Robin Baker; the deputy attorney general for social justice, Mylan Denerstein; Mr. Cuomo’s chief of staff, Steven Cohen, and Mr. Lawsky. All those except Mr. Lawsky overlapped as federal prosecutors in the 1990s.

And the fifth office, located directly across from Mr. Cuomo’s on the 25th floor of 120 Broadway, belongs to Eric Corngold, who was hired from the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn.

For these five, all within earshot of Mr. Cuomo, a shout across the hall— not a telephone call—is the usual mode of communication, a source said. Among this group, lunch is regularly purchased from the small deli in their office building and eaten communally in one of their offices.

Not a single one of Mr. Cuomo’s advisers worked in the office during the tenure of Mr. Cuomo’s predecessor, Eliot Spitzer. While Mr. Cuomo did extend job offers to some of Mr. Spitzer’s deputies and, sources say, did not push anybody out, most of Mr. Spitzer’s people followed their old boss to his new job, or departed for private practice.

Mr. Cuomo is said to have played a relatively hands-off role in the hiring decisions — made in the three months following last year’s election — deferring to his transition team.

His instructions were: “I want to appoint the best and the brightest,” the former state attorney general who headed the transition team, Robert Abrams, recalled. “You all know people. Go out and reach out to the quality people you know.”

The result has been a collection of accomplished former prosecutors.

The second-ranking attorney in the office under Mr. Spitzer, Michele Hirshman, now a partner at Paul Weiss, said, “If you look at the credentials of the folks Andrew has recruited, as a group I think they have better credentials than the people who joined us.”

Three of Mr. Cuomo’s aides have held jobs between leaving the U.S. attorneys’ office and joining Mr. Cuomo.

Ms. Denerstein had served as general counsel to the city’s fire department before she became Mr. Cuomo’s deputy for social justice. Benjamin Rosenberg, a former federal prosecutor, who left a partnership at Dechert LLP, now is Mr. Cuomo’s top trial strategist and is the lead man on the executive compensation case against the former New York Stock Exchange chief, Richard Grasso.

And Mr. Cuomo’s chief of staff, Steven Cohen, worked for eight years as a white-collar criminal defense attorney at the firm now known as Cooley Godward Kronish LLP, after a stint at the U.S. attorney’s office. In his current job, Mr. Cohen’s responsibility is less prosecutorial than managerial: helping Mr. Cuomo to run the 780-attorney office and coordinate efforts among the various city and bureau chiefs.

Mr. Lawsky, who is the no. 3 man at the office, is more likely to take the lead on specific investigations, as he has with ongoing inquiries into the student loan and mortgage industries.

Although of relatively junior rank at the U.S. attorney’s office — he was a line prosecutor in the securities fraud division — Mr. Lawsky had significant government experience: He had two federal clerkships and worked as counsel to Senator Schumer in Washington.

Mr. Cuomo hired two other lawyers in addition to Mr. Lawsky, — Ms. Baker and Nicole Gueron — directly away from the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Michael Garcia.

He also hired three prosecutors directly away from the U.S. attorney in Brooklyn, Roslynn Mauskopf, including her chief assistant and her top counsel.

“It is incredibly flattering when your colleagues are tapped for significant responsibilities in other offices,” Ms. Mauskopf said.

Among these is perhaps the most well known attorney on Mr. Cuomo’s staff, Barbara Underwood, who is the state’s solicitor general. A top appellate lawyer in the Justice Department under President Clinton, she briefly became acting solicitor general of America during the first months of George W. Bush’s first term. The second woman to receive tenure at Yale Law School, Ms. Underwood took the unusual step of leaving academia to become a prosecutor. She has worked at two district attorneys offices in the city and at the U.S. attorney office in Brooklyn, where she served as a counsel to Ms. Mauskopf before leaving for Mr. Cuomo’s office.

Earlier this year, she argued yet another case before the U.S. Supreme Court — no. 17 for her— on behalf of attorneys general of 37 states in a price-fixing case.

Mr. Cuomo also hired Ms. Mauskopf’s chief assistant, Eric Corngold, a leading securities fraud prosecutor. His investigation of Symbol Technologies in 2004 led to one of the first indictments to charge executives with backdating stock options. As Mr. Cuomo’s deputy attorney general for economic justice, Mr. Corngold has brought a case against Dell, alleging that the computer company’s credit program and home-repair insurance were deceptive.

Mr. Corngold is credited by colleagues with mentoring a generation of younger prosecutors in Brooklyn. Known for his sense of humor, Mr. Corngold’s speeches are considered one of the highlights at the many going-away parties for assistant U.S. attorneys, many of whom leave after four or five years. Mr. Corngold put in 16 years in the Brooklyn office.

Another securities fraud prosecutor, Linda Lacewell, also left an assistant U.S. attorney job in Brooklyn to join Mr. Cuomo.

Mr. Spitzer is generally credited with raising the stature of the attorney general’s office, thereby making it a more attractive place to work.

But other factors may be at work as well in helping Mr. Cuomo to lure these lawyers to work for him.

“This is just one man’s guess, but there are not that many appointed positions for highly skilled Democrats in the country these days,” a former principal deputy chief of the criminal division of the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn, David Pitofsky, said.

Of his onetime colleagues, Mr. Corngold and Ms. Underwood, Mr. Pitofsky, who is now at Goodwin Proctor LLP, said, “These were all people who, if there was a Democrat executive, would be up for high ranking jobs in the Department of Justice, or be up for judgeships.”

And for career prosecutors, whose professional decisions often boil down to whether to indict, the broader mission of the attorney general’s office can prove attractive.

For instance, to complement an investigation into conflict of interests between university financial aid offices and student loan companies, Mr. Cuomo’s office successfully pushed for legislation in Albany. A similar bill is pending in Congress.

“The aim is to have a broader effect,” Mr. Cohen, the chief of staff to Mr. Cuomo, said, adding that such an approach can be “very gratifying” for a prosecutor who is used to focusing on a single criminal case.

To illustrate Mr. Cuomo’s approach to law enforcement, Mr. Lawsky, Mr. Cuomo’s special assistant, recalled a recent conversation he had with Mr. Cuomo.

“I said ‘Andrew, you are what you sue’ — meaning that you’re defined by the cases you bring,” Mr. Lawsky said. “He sort of laughed about it. … He turned to me one night and said, ‘It’s not you are what you sue. You are what you solve.'”

Other members of Mr. Cuomo’s staff come from state government. Leslie Leach, who is in charge of the division that defends the state or its officials gave up a judgeship in Queens to join the attorney general. Ellen Nachtigall Biben, who handles public corruption cases for Mr. Cuomo, was hired from the Manhattan district attorney’s office, where she focused on labor racketeering cases. The deputy attorney general for civil rights, Jenny Rivera, left a position on the faculty of the City University of New York’s School of Law. The deputy attorney general for environmental protection, Katherine Kennedy, previously spent 18 years at the Natural Resources Defense Council.