We have recently reported that B(OCH2CF3)3 can be employed as a very effective catalyst for direct amidation reactions which is applicable to a wide range of substrates. 3g Remarkably, it can also be used for the catalytic direct amidation of many unprotected amino acids. The reactions were largely performed in tert-amyl methyl ether (TAME) as solvent, although selected reactions involving less nucleophilic but relatively apolar amines were more efficient in toluene. Important advantages of this catalytic system include an extremely wide substrate scope, together with a relatively high reaction concentration (0.5 M) which leads to efficient and scalable reactions. B(OCH2CF3)3 is available commercially, or can be synthesised on a large scale from B2O3 and CF3CH2OH. During the course of an ongoing research project on Pd-catalysed direct C-H arylation reactions, we needed to prepare a series of amides derived from picolinic acid such as 1. Initial evaluation of our catalytic amidation method using TAME as a solvent led to a moderate 71% yield of the desired amide 1 with 20 mol% catalyst (Table , entry 1).