Jane Osgood runs a lobster business, which supports her two young children. Railroad staff inattention ruins her shipment, so with her lawyer George, Jane sues Harry Foster Malone, director of the line and the "meanest man in the world".
At the beginning of the movie, barrels of dead lobsters are returned to Jane, the lobster farmer, because they arrived dead at their destination by train. But considering that their destination was a restaurant where they would have been cooked alive, maybe their death was better.
The lobsters didn't die in screen, but we're shown dead. James children have a pet lobster that they take into the house to watch tv and sit on the couch, but he is returned to the holding tank in time each night and nothing bad happens to him.