Berney grew up in Alabama and was elected president of the student council in high school. He won the Sewanee University award for Outstanding Character. He attended Dartmouth College in the Ivy League where he graduated near at the top of his class and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He graduated summa cum laude in 1973. In 1975, he received a Masters degree from Yale University. He earned his law degree from Tulane in 1978 where he was selected a finalist in the Tulane Moot Court, a two-year trial tournament to determine the best trial lawyers in his class at Tulane Law School.
After Tulane, he worked for five years at Phelps, Dunbar, the largest maritime offshore defense firm in the country. He then became a Partner in charge of handling maritime personal injury cases at Barham and Churchill. In 1986, he started his own law practice devoted to representing victims of serious trucking and maritime injury cases.