Elizabeth M. van den Berg was born in Miami, Florida. She spent most of her childhood in Naples, Florida, where she graduated from Barron Collier High School with High Honors in 1994. She is a graduate of the University of South Florida, where she studied Criminology and Women's Studies and volunteered as a Guardian ad Litem and with Save Our Strays, a not-for-profit feral cat rescue agency. While in law school at The Florida State University College of Law, Elizabeth worked as a research clerk in the Legal Department of the Florida Department of Insurance and completed a Certified Legal Internship with the State Attorney's Office of the Thirteenth Judicial Circuit in Tampa, Florida. Her last year in law school, she also served as Co-Justice of the Phi Alpha Delta International Law Fraternity. Elizabeth returned to Southwest Florida in 2006, where she resides with her son. After teaching as an adjunct professor in the Paralegal Studies department of Edison College in 2008, she joined Goldstein, Buckley, Cechman, Rice and Purtz, P.A., where she works primarily with Personal Injury cases.