Direct Palladium-Catalyzed β-Arylation of Lactams.

A direct and catalytic method is reported here for β-arylation of N-protected lactams with simple aryl iodides. The transformation is enabled by merging soft enolization of lactams, palladium-catalyzed desaturation, Ar-X bond activation, and aryl conjugate addition. The reaction is operated under mild reaction conditions, is scalable, and is chemoselective. Application of this method to concise syntheses of pharmaceutically relevant compounds is demonstrated.