WHEN an associate at the law firm Greenberg Traurig first told Cesar Alvarez, the chief executive, that domestic violence was a workplace issue that the firm needed to address, he was skeptical.

“I just didn’t see it,” he recalled. “You weigh how important things are by the number of problems you see, and I didn’t see a lot of problems.”

There had been one incident several years earlier, he said, when an employee’s partner had come to the office. “Nothing horrible happened, but they did get in,” he said. That was all he knew about.