Indiana Contractor Owed $40k By South Dakota Company For Hospital Work In California — Company Dissolved. Legal Options?

Location: Indiana, South Dakota, California

My husband worked as a 1099 contractor, with a written contract, for a medical staffing agency based in South Dakota from 2022–2023. We live in Indiana, and the work he performed was in a hospital in California.

He works in the medical field. The setup was similar to travel nursing staff: a healthcare organization contracted with the staffing agency to provide personnel for a hospital program. My husband contracted with the staffing agency as an independent contractor, and the agency billed the healthcare organization for his work and was supposed to pay him from those payments.

He had an independent contractor agreement with the agency and submitted invoices monthly. They paid normally until October 2023, when payments suddenly stopped.

He continued working through December 2023, but by that point unpaid invoices had grown to over $40,000.

After he stopped working for them, the company sent a few partial payments ($7k here, $5k there), but eventually stopped entirely.

The company name ended with “Ltd.” and it was administratively dissolved by the State of South Dakota on December 16, 2024 for failing to file its annual report.

Several other contractors were also not paid (most are owed less than $10k). A group of them hired an attorney and my husband joined in and paid into the retainer.

After a few months, the attorney’s office told him they were dropping the case because they could not locate the company owners to serve them.

However, one of the owners appears to still be active on Facebook, so it doesn’t seem like they would be impossible to locate.

At one point, one of the owners told my husband that the healthcare organization had stopped paying the agency. However, we have no way to verify whether that is true, and we were never provided documentation supporting that claim.

It may also be relevant that my husband is still performing the same work at the same hospital system, just through a different staffing agency, and has had no issues receiving payment for that work. Because of this, we suspect the previous staffing agency may have continued receiving payment for his work but did not pass those payments along to him, although we do not have direct confirmation of that.

We still have copies of all invoices, payment records, and written communications with the agency regarding the unpaid work.

At this point my husband is still owed a little over $40,000.

My questions:

1. Do we still have any realistic legal options to pursue this money?
2. If the company was administratively dissolved, can the owners still be held personally liable for unpaid contractor invoices?
3. What type of attorney should we be looking for (business litigation, employment law, etc.)?
4. Does the fact that the situation involves multiple states (Indiana, California, South Dakota) make this significantly more complicated?

We’re trying to figure out whether pursuing further legal action makes sense or if this is likely a dead end.

Any guidance would be appreciated.