Legal Question in Family Law in Texas

I think you probably should be allowed to get your money back, but you were never entitled to a jury--a bill of review is not a trial proceeding. It's a legal procedure designed to allow the possibility of opening back up a closed case after the trial period is all over and done with, so that if something really did go horribly wrong at the trial level, youmean potentially get a new trial on the merits. But it, in and of itself, is not at all a trial, and the judge would be the only one would could hear it.

Bills of review are also pretty complicated procedurally, and there's a good chance that if you didn't have an attorney at either the trial level or for the BOR proceeding, you may have messed something up (a deadline you missed, a notice you failed to send, something required to be included in the pleading that you left out). If so, you may have actually prevented the judge from legally being able to address the merits of whatever you were saying (if the judge had just ignored it and given you a new trial, the other side could have appealed the case and won just on those procedural grounds). The fact that you say it was "dismissed" seems to support that--it would have been "denied" if it had actually been considered as to whether there was any merit to it or not.