Development of photochemical strategies to generate metal nitrenoid species promises to provide opportunities to study reactive intermediates that display fleeting lifetimes. Organic azide ligands have been recognized as potential photoprecursors to metal nitrenes, but few kinetically stable transition metal adducts of these ligands have been characterized. We have been attracted to photoactivation of N-X bonds within haloamide ligands as a potentially generalizable strategy to photochemically generate nitrene fragments within the primary coordination sphere of transition metal ions. This strategy is motivated by the ubiquity of N-X photoactivation in the organic chemistry of haloamines and by analogy to the oxo photochemistry of metal oxyanion complexes. Unlike the organic chemistry of N-haloamines, however, the synthetic chemistry and photoactivity of N-haloamide complexes is almost completely undeveloped.